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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr 



GLAD TIDINGS 



Glad Tidings 



A Selection from the Sermons 

OF 

REUEN THOMAS 

Pastor of Harvard Church, Brookline 




boston 

THE PILGRIM PRESS 

NEW YORK CHICAGO 



UBHA^Y of G^.i^Gl^ESS 
Two Ccrjie? ??sX-e!Yed 

8EC It 1908 

Copy rig nt tntry 

2 ^^6 7/ 

COPY o/ 



Copyright, 1908 
By L. C. Thomas 






The Arakelyan Press, Boston, Mass. 



FOREWORD 



In presenting this volume of sermons, allow me 
to say that they are intended primarily for the 
members and congregation of Dr. Thomas' be- 
loved church, many of whom have expressed a 
strong desire to retain in permanent form some 
words of their former pastor. They have been pub- 
lished without any revision, just as the manuscripts 
were found and as they were spoken from the 
Harvard Church pulpit. 

L. C. Thomas. 



CONTENTS 



I The Divine Manifested in the Human . . 3 

II Our Garden of Eden 17 

III The Resurrection a Revelation of Man's 

Capabilities 31 

IV Making Man 45 

V The King's Own 59 

VI The Church of Christ ^z 

VII The Bible and How It Became What It Is 91 

VIII The Fight of Life 107 

IX Life's Choices 121 

X Long Sight 135 

XI The Vision in the Bush 149 

XII The Day of Adversity 163 

XIII The Universality of the Divine Presence . 177 

XIV Love Predominant 193 

XV The Inequalities of Life 207 

XVI The Thirst of the Soul 223 

XVII The Withdrawal of Jesus 235 

XVIII Law and Grace 247 

XIX The Final Judgment 263 

XX Rejoice in the Lord 281 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE 
HUMAN 



The mystery which hath been hid for ages and gen- 
erations: hut now hath it been manifested to 
his saints. — Colossians i: 26. 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE 
HUMAN 

In celebrating our Christmas festival there is 
great propriety that sincere Christian disciples 
should come into the sanctuary of the Lord's house 
and mentally, worshipfully, enter into that Holy of 
holies where God reveals himself to those who 
with faith and love wait upon him. 

We are constantly tempted tO' the vulgarizing and 
degrading of Christian festivals. The chastened 
thought, the devout feeling which they ought to 
excite we are apt to miss in the excessive attention 
which, at a time like Christmas, we give to the showy 
externalities that have obtruded themselves upon us. 
Of course, there is much to be said for that kind of 
good feeling which Dickens has dramatized so ex- 
quisitely in his Christmas Carol, where a miserly 
old creature is melted into a beautiful humaneness 
of disposition by the influence of an extraordinary 
dream. But the trust committed to the Christian 
Church is of a sublime dignity and greatness — to 
preserve to the world a mighty fact embodying a 
truth so great that its area is as broad as humanity, 
the truth of the Incarnation, the divine manifested 
in the human, a truth which is not simply some- 
thing speculative for the human mind to discuss; 



4 GLAD TIDINGS 

but a truth so practical that it gives the law for all 
effective life, human and divine. 

If we are to appreciate this truth as we ought we 
must receive it in the beautiful human way in which 
it is given. The truth of the Incarnation comes to 
us first as a babe, making its appeal to the heart of 
every true woman and to the loving curiosity of 
every inquiring child. The truth begins by claim- 
ing our life in the cradle. It comes to sanctify 
every home by exalting motherhood as God's 
most sacred means of the revelation of himself. 
Take a true, genuine, pure woman, like Mary of 
Nazareth, devoutly submissive to the divine will, 
and there is no channel of revelation to be found 
on earth that so faithfully adumbrates the divine 
love. Over every such woman the words may not 
inappropriately be used: "the power of the Most 
High shall overshadow thee." 

Idle and irreverent curiosity may perplex itself 
with the mystery of the Incarnation and make no 
practical advance into the heart of the matter. Of 
course there is mystery. Everything in the world 
is draped in mystery. The whole of anything we 
can name is not known to us. The mystery of crea- 
tion; the mystery of man's own nature — these re- 
main about as they always have been, from the time 
when Plato reasoned in Athens to the day we call 
our own. There is a limit, but never a cessation, 
never an end, to all man's mental researches. The 
human mind feels infinity knocking at its doors 
and is always restless and aspiring when it is alive. 
Its greatness is shown in its continual soaring. If 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN 5 

the mystery of man's own nature is insolvable, if 
the mystery of creation baffles us, what else can we 
expect than that what an apostle calls the mystery 
of godliness — ^^He who was manifested in the 
flesh'' — should refuse to disclose its eternal se- 
cret? Take away mystery and you take away in- 
finity and eternity. 

This word ''mystery" occurs about twenty-six times 
in the New Testament and ten of them are within 
the brief compass of the letters to the Ephesians and 
Colossians, testifying to us that the great apostle 
from Tarsus had brooded over the facts he had to 
handle from the intellectual side. Generally speak- 
ing, however, the word "mystery" on his lips means 
something which had been concealed but is now re- 
vealed. The great mystery of the New Testament 
is the divine way of salvation hitherto hidden from 
the world, but now revealed in Christ. So far from 
the Incarnation, the appearance of the divine in the 
human, being simply an enigma, or a ''theological 
puzzle for the exercise of the logical understanding" 
it is, says one of our greatest modern scholars in the 
fields of philosophy and theology, "the very fun- 
damental principle of the Christian religion, and the 
supreme source of its moral and spiritual power." 

There is always a temptation to try to handle a 
matter of this kind in a way in which it would be 
interesting to only about a score of people in a con- 
gregation, and I want to avoid that. I want that 
everybody should feel the truth of a thing, even if 
they cannot grasp it intellectually. For we learn 
more through feeling and imagination than through 



6 GLAD TIDINGS 

intellect. We all should have a vital grasp of Chris- 
tian truth if only our wills v^ere determinedly set 
to do the divine will, and so in all simplicity I 
should try to bring our great Christmas fact of the 
Incarnation within the grasp of everyone. 

A great thinker has penned these words: ''There 
is a sense in which it may be said that God would 
not be God without union with man ; and man would 
not be truly man without union with God." That 
is a statement worth remembering. The infinite in- 
cludes the finite, just as the firmament includes this 
building. The divine and human are not antago- 
nistic, they are cooperative. The divine expresses 
itself in and through the human. In every one of us 
is a spark from that divine furnace of life which 
glows eternally. We may do our utmost to quench 
it; but we cannot. If we succeeded, it would be 
our own extinction. In every one of us there is 
father and mother and God. That, I think, is the 
reason why the most robust thinker among the apos- 
tles insists on each man as being a trinity in unity, 
body, soul, and spirit. 

The Incarnation — what has it done ? Has it not 
thrown a flood of light upon the nature of God and 
the nature of man? And, after all, our conduct, 
as to whether it is wise or foolish, right or wrong, 
must depend upon what God is and what man is. 

Think what the Incarnation has done for our 
idea of God. It has brought Deity within the range 
of our human sympathies. Of old, men had their 
great words for setting in evidence their idea of 
God — omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent — but 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN 7 

did they touch any human heart? They overawed 
men. They put Deity at a distance. As children, 
we were taught that Deity was beyond the clouds — 
far — far off. Some few elect souls rose to riper 
and better ideas. But the multitude of men had a 
god afar off and not nigh, an omnipotent sovereign 
only. The heart of Deity had never been disclosed 
till Jesus came and lived the divine love into a form 
of expression which the world had never beforetime 
had. Under the disturbing influence of the new in- 
spiration the apostles were perplexed. "Teach us 
to pray. Our old prayers don't fit our new feel- 
ings." And the great throbbing word came trem- 
bling and rejoicing on the astonished air — "Say, 
our Father.'' And then, by and by, more emphat- 
ically : "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
What, then, has the Incarnation done for our 
idea of God? It has not dethroned the distant 
monarch of the universe, it has only done away 
with the distance. Time and space are conditions 
of man's life, not of God's. Between natures ab- 
solutely unlike there can be no communion, no fel- 
lowship. If God is in all respects unlike man, 
knowledge of him is impossible, worship the expres- 
sion of terror only. For aught we know, he may 
be a sovereign devil. He may hate us. He may 
despise us. He may scorn us. He may delight in 
tormenting us. The plagues of Egypt may declare 
his disposition. Heaven may be only a hypocritical 
name for hell. The birth of babes into this world 
may be a calamity, as godless pessimists affirm. 
The babe of Bethlehem may not have consecrated 



8 GLAD TIDINGS 

every babe that henceforth shall live as "of the king- 
dom of heaven." ''Suffer the little children, and 
forbid them not, to come unto me : for to such be- 
longeth the kingdom of heaven," are words which 
give a new value to child life. They are the child's 
Magna Charta. They make the bringing up of 
children in godlessness a crime, a defrauding of the 
little ones of their richest inheritance, the leaving 
undeveloped souls, in their most susceptible years, 
to be preyed upon, with no resistance in them, by 
world, flesh, and devil. The Moloch altars which 
even our modern semi-paganized civilization has 
erected on which to sacrifice potential infancy are 
not, it is true, in evidence, as were the Moloch al- 
tars of the ancient Canaanites, but they exist. 

The Incarnation has consecrated the babe and the 
cradle and the home, as no other fact in our human 
history. The gospel of the Incarnation is, there- 
fore, a child's gospel. It puts the child at the 
center of civilization proclaiming in tones which vi- 
brate with the love of God its right to be, its right 
to live, its embosomment in the fatherhood of God. 
The divine spark, inextinguishable, is in every na- 
ture. Whether, once given, it can ever be with- 
drawn is a question easy to ask, but in our present 
earth-life unanswerable. Not simply an omnipotent 
power — not a relentless fate, the infinite person- 
aHty of God as the sovereign father of his human 
children, has been so definitely declared in the In- 
carnation as to be henceforth and forever the foun- 
tain from which streams of living water pour forth 
to quench the thirst of all the children of God. Un- 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN 9 

derneath the Lord's Prayer is the Incarnation. The 
one without the other is impossible. "He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father'' — that is the iUum- 
inating and inspiring revelation which comes to us 
in the sinless personality of Jesus the Christ. How 
much is involved in this revelation I must leave you 
to work out for yourselves. 

For we have another subsidiary revelation equally 
important. The Incarnation, the coming of Jesus 
into our human history, changes our view of this 
human nature of ours. The life of the flesh is only 
temporary and external. Our intellectual life is 
only, as it were, the life of the child at school. We 
know nothing yet as we ought to know it. We have 
a moral life, a spiritual life. Our conduct in the 
world is of the highest importance. By immorality 
we destroy the finest parts of our nature; by fol- 
lowing the flesh instead of the spirit we disinherit 
ourselves. Instead of living as sons and daughters 
of the Lord Almighty, we become brute beasts, yea, 
there is a possibility of something worse. A man 
may become a very devil for malignity and hate, 
a condition which to a brute beast is impossible. 

The Incarnation proclaims that in our nature 
there is an infinite element. We are greater than 
we seem, nobler than we are willing to admit. That 
infinite element within (that divine spark, as I 
called it a moment ago) is the cause of our as- 
piration and of our depression. Man can soar so 
high as to wear a martyr's crown. Woman can be- 
come angelic. He — she — can sink so low as to 
excite our disgust and contempt. Why? The di- 



10 GLAD TIDINGS 

vine spark within is the only explanation. It is the 
kindling warmth of that which makes a man fling 
away his life for a cause or an idea. As in Luther's 
great hymn : 

*'Let goods and kindred go, 
This mortal life also, 
The body they may kill : 
God's truth abideth still, 
His Kingdom is for ever," 

The kindling w^armth of that divine spark makes 
man heroic. It makes him a poet like Milton, or 
a patriot like Hampden, or a statesman like Glad- 
stone, or a Christian explorer like Livingstone. 
There is on all these a seal of God — an unmistak- 
able stamp of divinity, and in whomsoever the spark 
burns it gives vision — the seeing-power, the ability 
of seeing through things to something beyond. 
When we look at our humanity, if we lack spiritual 
vision, what do we fasten our eyes on ? Everything 
transient, weak, imperfect, disability, moral defile- 
ment. We see the coarseness and corruptness of 
men and then we publish newspapers to gather up 
all this coarseness and corruptness and display it on 
the printed page. Thus we educate our boys and 
girls. And then we wonder at the tragedies of ex- 
istence, even among the young. It is enough to 
make sensitive minds pessimistic. How shall we get 
away from and above these clouds which hang 
around our human history and this thick darkness 
which enfolds it? By asking Christ to lend us his 
eyes with which to see below the surface of human 
life. Then we see sin and misery inseparably asso- 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN ii 

dated. ''There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the 
wicked." Is there not gospel even in that? We 
see every day how^ true it is. Man was not made 
to be wicked. He cannot rest and be happy in it. 
Only good men can hear the music of the spheres. 
Only a good man can write : 

"It sounds from all things old: 
It sounds from -Al things young. 
From all that's fair, from all that's foul, 
Peals out a cheerful song." 

Only a good man can carry music in his heart. 

"Only one institution in human society carries the 
dew of its youth and through the conflict of the cen- 
turies still chants its morning song. It is the re- 
ligion of Jesus. And by the religion of Jesus I do 
not mean anything else or other than this: The 
Christianity which centers in the person of the Son 
of God, wnth his revelation of the Father and his 
gospel of salvation; with his hope oi immortality 
and his victory of soul. This Christianity endures, 
while civilizations exhaust themselves and pass away 
and the face of the world changes.'' This gospel 
is worth preaching. There is nothing else that can 
touch man so deeply. Man is worth redeeming. 
He is redeemable. That is the gospel of the Incar- 
nation. That is the Christmas note. ''Rejoice and 
be glad, the Redeemer has come" — that is the 
Christmas carol every heart should sing. Can you 
sing it? 

We have a new vision of God, a new vision of 
man. The nature of God is shown in this, that by 
the voice of one who is Son of man and Son of God 



12 GLAD TIDINGS 

he calls the least and lowest, even the guiltiest and 
most degraded of mankind, to be sons of God, to 
be perfect as God is perfect, to be heirs of God and 
joint heirs with Christ. Thus Christianity has be- 
come the source of a new conception of the infinite 
value of human nature. It has quickened all our 
faculties and put new energy into all our powers. 
It has delivered us from the fear of death. It has 
awakened in us the hope of a future destiny which 
neither time nor change can arrest. What has done 
all this? The Incarnation. The new revelation of 
Avhat God is and what man is. 

I should like to stop at this point — the point of 
thoughtful contemplation of the great treasures of 
thought and feeling which have come to us in the 
incarnation of our Lord — a new God — a new 
man — but I must not. Thought and feeling do 
not make up the whole of life. Thought and feel- 
ing must develop into action or they are worth 
nothing. Professor James and all the leading 
psychologists of our time insist that the training 
of the will by self-control and wise and well-directed 
action is the only education worth anything. With- 
out a life of wise and well-ordered action, there can 
be neither character, nor happiness, nor influence. 

This is entirely in accord with New Testament 
teaching. The truths of the gospel must be incar- 
nated by you and me before we feel them and know 
them, as the atmosphere which surrounds us must 
be taken into our lungs before it can do us any good. 
And in order to have capacious lungs, we must exer- 
cise. We must walk or do something which will 



THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN 13 

compel deep breathing. No one can question this. It 
is even so mentally, morally, spiritually. No one can 
have respectable thinking-power v^ho does not some- 
times wrestle with a great thinker. No one can have 
moral resoluteness who does not vigorously fight 
the propensity in himself to loaf and let evil have 
its way. No one can be spiritually open-eyed who 
does not steadfastly and continuously put himself in 
the presence of great objective truths and forces and 
persons. We are made for activity not idleness. 
Without work we can never come to our best. 

In our day there is too much busy idleness. It 
counts for nothing. Many of us need the lesson 
of Robert Herrick's novel, The Common Lot. 
Helen, wise woman, addresses her husband thus: 
*'We are all trying to get out of the ranks, to leave 
the common work to be done by others, to be lead- 
ers. We think it a disgrace to stay in the ranks, 
to work for work's sake, to bear the common lot, 
which is to live simply and labor. Don't let us 
struggle that way any longer, dear! It is wrong. 
It is a curse. It will never give us happiness — 
never!" And she was right. If every man had a 
wife like that, the country would not need so many 
insane asylums. 

But what has this to do with our subject? Where 
is the application? Here: Every doctrine of the 
New Testament has to become action of some kind 
before we can feel it or understand it. In a word, 
it has to become incarnate. It has to become a liv- 
ing man or woman. Men and women and children 
are reading you and me every day. What are they 



14 GLAD TIDINGS 

reading? Are they perfectly sure that we are lov- 
ing- men and women? sympathetic men and women? 
considerate men and women? helpful men and 
women? forgiving men and women? self-controlled 
men and women? or are they reading in us pride, 
selfishness, hardness, unbrotherliness, unsisterliness 
and so on? In a word — are we living the great 
truth of the Incarnation? 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 



And Jehovah Cod planted a garden eastward, in 
Eden; and there he put the man whom he had 
formed, — Gen, 2: 8, 



II 

OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 

I can believe that an intelligent child reading this 
narrative of Eden would be intensely delighted with 
it. There is something about it which captivates 
the imagination. It is all vivid and concrete. 
There is nothing abstract. It is not a record of vir- 
tues and qualities, but of man and woman, of ani- 
mals, birds, trees, rivers, landscape, and so on. It 
has about it those concrete features which make 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as interesting to a 
child as to a man. 

Now it is possible so to interpret Bunyan's Pil- 
grim's Progress as to make it ridiculous and even 
disgusting. You have only to get a dry-as-dust 
mind, mathematical, logical, literal, matter-of-fact, 
no poetical quality in it, no imagination, and Bun- 
yan's Pilgrim's Progress would appear silly and ab- 
surd. It is a work of genius of a very high order. 
From a literary point of view, it is remarkable for 
its crisp, clear Saxon speech. But this dry-as-dust 
mind sees nothing in it but a silly story of a fool 
of a man who left his home on a wild-goose chase 
for an imaginary Utopia. Precisely so is it witli 
these earliest Hebrew narratives when they do not 
accomplish what they were intended to do — to 



i8 



GLAD TIDINGS 



wake up our imagination, and by waking up our 
imagination, wake up every other of our mental 
faculties into vigorous life. 

Without further preliminary skirmishing, I want, 
if I can, to suggest how this earliest of all Biblical 
pictures is an accurate representation of our human 
life — yours and mine. We all of us begin with 
our garden of Eden — in other words, we begin 
with our sheltered home life, where for quite a time 
we are kept from everything which will harm us. 
We are innocent. We don't know much. The tree 
of life is there in that garden. Daily we eat of it. 
But there is another tree, the tree of knowledge — 
knowledge of good and of evil. How much is rep- 
resented by this tree I need hardly say. But I would 
ask you to admire the superb genius which into this 
Eden picture has put these two trees. The tree of 
life is not the tree of knowledge and the tree of 
knowledge is not tlie tree of life. Life is profounder 
and deeper than mere knowledge. Knowledge is 
necessary to supply life with ideas and to stimulate 
feelings. But so long as we are in this sheltered 
garden-of-Eden state, we are incapable of using cer- 
tain kinds of knowledge. And so the tree is a for- 
bidden tree. A child has to learn obedience not 
simply by doing, but by not doing. In the natural 
order of discipline law comes before gospel, or either 
they come together, the ''thou shalt not'' and the 
"thou shalt." A child has to learn that there are 
some things it must not touch and not have and 
not do. And there is no other way of training the 
will. All this is matter of common experience and 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 19 

it is all suggested in this garden-of-Eden picture. 
The tree of life is not the tree of the knowledge of 
good and evil. 

''But why,'' asks one, ''does this tree bear tw^o 
sorts of fruit?" Because knowledge is relative to 
personality. That w^hich is good for a grown man 
to know may only be poison to a boy or girl. That 
which is good for us at one time in life may be dan- 
gerous and demoralizing at another time. Money 
which will not hurt the disciplined man who has 
worked for it, may ruin a young man who has had 
no such discipline. Always the tree of knowledge 
is of good and evil. It cannot be otherwise. Be- 
cause knowledg*e may be used to expand the mind 
and enrich the life, or it may be used to liberate the 
mind from wholesome restrictions and thus to pol- 
lute the life. In distinguishing between life and 
mere knowledge and in making the tree of knowl- 
edge to yield good and evil fruits, this penman 
shows genius, I should personally prefer the word 
inspiration. 

We go a step further and there w^e meet with 
temptation, put in the concrete form of the Old 
Serpent to express the subtle way in which tempta- 
tion comes. A better term could not have been 
found. The serpent with its graceful convolutions, 
its rainbow-tinted skin, its restless, wicked eye — 
what other figure could have been found so ade- 
quately to represent the nature of temptation ? Just 
as a man naturally shrinks from a serpent, so when 
temptation first comes to him in concrete form a 
man naturallv fears. There is in us an instinct of 



I 



20 GLAD TIDINGS 

aversion to evil, but that instinct is not enough. We 
need something else — discipHne and training to 
bring the instinct into will-power. Into the sphere of 
every life, in some form or other, the Old Serpent 
comes. True to life is this record. The Old Ser- 
pent, in the form of some man or woman, with 
plausible speech and insinuating manner, begins by 
suggesting doubt. That is always the first step. 
**Yea, hath God said. Ye shall not eat?'' I am sur- 
prised! There must be some mistake. A tree of 
knowledge and not to eat of it! Is not all knowl- 
edge good? Does it not open the eyes? *'Ye shall 
not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.'' 
"Ye shall not surely die!" You have misunder- 
stood what was said. ''God doth know that in the 
day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, 
and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil." 
The same old devil, you see, as we have to-day. 
The same suggestion of doubt, the same exciting 
of curiosity, the same appeal to personal pride. The 
same old devil ! In whatever guise he comes, "his 
craft and power are great," as Luther puts it. In- 
sinuation, the suggestion of doubt, the exciting of 
curiosity, the appeal to personal pride. "I wouldn't, 
if I were you, be under such bonds, such fanatical 
limitations, and such prejudices! There must be a 
mistake somewhere. Whoever heard of knowledge 
corrupting? 'A tree to be desired to make one 
wise !' " Then as now, it is exactly the way in 
which innocence is drawn into guilt. There is no 
new sin and no new temptation; it is all as old as 
Adam and Eden. 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 21 

Then our narrative goes on and tells us of the 
fall from innocence and the fall from faith into doubt 
and then into distrust of God and then into fear and 
then into self-accusation and mutual recrimination. 
The world is no longer delightful. Service is no 
longer agreeable. Eden is lost. 

Now I know that to talk of the fall of man in 
these days when evolution has come to be a kind of 
dominant thought in science and literature is to 
close up the ears of some people against all further 
attention. And therefore I am about to make a dog- 
matic statement (though I believe in evolution and 
work under its influence). But this I will say with- 
out any reserve — That whoever lives in our time 
and looks into the common facts of life and does 
not recognize the fall of man, must be an idiot. 

It seems to me that there is scarcely anything 
else to be found in the newspapers which most 
people seem to read than accumulated and un- 
numbered proofs of the fall of man. The 
other day a very distinguished scientist was speak- 
ing in London and he used these words: '*It 
is easy to say (ex-cathedra) the story of the Fall 
is untrue and to receive applause from the unthink- 
ing for doing so But the traditions of the Fall and 
the facts of the early history of the race are not an- 
nihilated by an autocratic deliverance or a piece of 
rhetoric. The knowledge of good and evil came 
to be the possession of the race when man merged 
out of a paradise of innocency and the beginning 
of a sense of degradation, not previously felt when 
in the lower stages." The progress of the race has 



22 GLAD TIDINGS 

never been in a straight line. Its history has been 
one of fall and recovery over and over again. Let 
us stick resolutely to common facts of everyday life 
and we shall get the most illuminating expositions 
of our biologic and theologic ideas. 

Here is a man who was nurtured in a very Eden 
of a home. His father was a consistent and intelli- 
gent Christian man, his mother was an unusually 
good and wise woman. He has no religion worth 
anything. He chooses for his companions men in- 
ferior in every way to his own father and women 
not anyway, in mind and heart, comparable to his 
own mother. Is that man our illustration of the 
fall of man, or not ? I say, yes. And there are mul- 
titudes of such cases. Evolution, if it meant what 
the generality of people who learn their theology 
and science and philosophy from the newspapers and 
the ten-cent magazines think it means, would in- 
volve that every son should be a better man than 
his father; that each generation of men should be 
in every way ahead of the preceding generation. Is 
it so? We know it is not. We read the pages of 
history and what do we find? The garden-of-Eden 
story over and over and over again. Nation after 
nation sinking by its corruptions into weakness, 
losing moral fiber, losing courage, attacked and 
defeated by more vigorous and less civilized peo- 
ples. 

That which we see on the broad scale of national 
life we see over and over again in families and in 
individuals. If only we will wake up our imagina- 
tion to open wider our intellectual perceptions, it 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 23 

will be plain to us that in this garden-of-Eden pic- 
ture we have one of the most complete representa- 
tions of our human life as it is lived before us in our 
own day. Wherever there has been an ideal home 
life, with those virtues and graces which have made 
Anglo-Saxondom what it has been; wherever there 
has been a home with a cheerful piety, living faith 
in God, high integrity in conduct, an atmosphere 
which was charged with all pure and tonic elements 
contributing to mental and spiritual health — there 
has been our modern garden of Eden. 

In that garden God and man are represented in 
communion. Man has no slavish fear of God. He 
is not afraid of the divine because he is not con- 
scious of being in rebellion against it. Not till the 
man and woman set up on their own account in self- 
willed rebellion does fear come in — fear of the di- 
vine and a desire to hide away from it. Is it not 
precisely so in our human life? Wherever there is 
a family which has fallen from that beautiful ideal, 
there is a lost Eden. Wherever there is a family in 
which there is no recognition of the divine, a fam- 
ily whose atmosphere is not charged with that rev- 
erence which always abides in man as God made 
him, there is reenacted the fall of man. Wherever 
there is an individual man or woman whose life is 
planned and ordered on the ignoring of the divine, 
there is evidence of the fall of man. Wherever a 
man leaves the higher for the lower, the nobler for 
the baser, spirit for flesh — there is the fall of man 
reenacted. There is no denying these facts and 
no getting clear of these inferences. 



24 GLAD TIDINGS 

It is customary in our day to say : *'Oh, yes, I be- 
lieve in the fall of man, but it was a fall upward 
from a state of innocence to a state of knowledge 
and new experience. It was progress therefore/' 
I am not going to deny that there is a sense in which 
those words are true. But if it be suggested that 
there was no other road to progress but that, I join 
issue. And I do it on the strength of the illumin- 
ation there is in the facts of our common life. 

Here are two young men. I have them before 
my mind's eye. They are not inventions. They are 
living facts. One keeps the home feeling, the home 
reverences. He goes out to his life's work. He 
keeps his integrity. He maintains his self-respect. 
He is specially careful as to his associates. Of the 
tree of knowledge he has discrimination enough to 
pluck only the good fruit. He resolutely keeps, I 
repeat, his self-respect, his integrity, and his purity. 
He inserts himself into the company of the faithful 
because he knows that only by faith can a man live 
his best life. Is that man less of a man than this 
other to whom in a moment I will refer? Look at 
his form and look at his face. Listen to the char- 
acter tones in his voice. These tell the story of a 
pure and intelligent manliness. This man is not 
fallen. He has held his integrity. He has been in 
unbroken communion with the divine. 

The other began in Eden. He listened to the 
tempter, as Faust to Mephistopheles. All those 
plausible reasonings to which I have alluded, he dal- 
lied with, until in the place of faith there came 
doubt; and in the place of confidence, fear; and in 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 25 

the place of quietude of spirit, unrest; and in the 
place of love, lust and aversion and hatred. He was 
outside his garden of Eden. On God and his guid- 
ance in conscience he had turned his back. Is he a 
better man than the other? He knows more of 
a sort, but he has lost more. He has lost his 
self-respect, his sense of integrity, his ability of 
saying an immediate and resolute. No! to Mephis- 
topheles when he comes around. And, as a 
consequence, he has lost his faith in men — for 
it is almost impossible to lose one's faith in God 
and keep it in men. If anyone should say that this 
last man has an}i;hing good in wisdom or knowledge 
or feeling or will which the first has not — I chal- 
lenge proof. I will tell you what he has not that 
the other has. He has not so clean a soul. He has 
not so restful an eye. He has not so honest a voice. 
He has not so resolute a will. He has not so agree- 
able a feeling of self-respect. The one man has 
nothing to cover up. The other has several cup- 
boards in which there are skeletons and he is afraid 
lest some one should find the key and open the doors. 
This garden-of-Eden story is almost photo- 
graphically correct of the way in which every man 
who falls, falls. It is a picture for all time and for 
every place. If men would only read the Bible in 
the light of the facts of human life with which we 
are familiar, the question of its inspiration 
would be asked no more. How do I know this 
book is inspired? How? It knows me better than 
I know myself. It knows human nature more ac- 
curately and minutely and profoundly, at a deeper 



26 GLAD TIDINGS 

depth, than any poet or any philosopher or any psy- 
chologist I ever met with. That is my answer for 
myself. Of that I have not even the remnant of a 
doubt. 

And so, let us each to himself apply our theme 
by asking: Am I fallen? Have I lost my Eden? 
Have I lapsed from a former spirituality of 
mind? Am I less desirous of using the means 
of communion with the divine than once I was? Is 
my faith in Christ's service a little more shaky than 
once? Is my zeal a little cooler? Have I lost my 
first love? Has my will to good been fortified by 
a persistent submission to the divine will? Do I 
know what it is to rest in the Lord and wait pa- 
tiently for his working out his great designs? 
What church am I a member of — is it the church 
of Laodicea ? When I compare my present self with 
a former self, have I fallen? Do I in my own per- 
sonal history illustrate this old patriarchal allegory? 
The Bible was never intended to be interpreted 
by unspiritualized mind. It has an inner sense 
w^hich appeals to the spirit in man. And many a 
man says: "I don't believe in your garden-of-Eden 
story," when he himself in his own person is a liv- 
ing proof of its truth. Our great Teacher has told 
us positively that he sometimes spoke in parables 
for the very purpose of hiding the truth from men, 
whose rejection of it would only have added to 
their guilt. And so, for aught we know, our Bible 
may have been constructed on the principle of dis- 
closing its inner spiritual meaning to all spiritualized 
minds, while to others it is only a perplexing and 



^1 



OUR GARDEN OF EDEN 27 

mysterious history of an obstinate and self-willed 
people. 

Be that as it may, in the light of these sugges- 
tions, does there not come into that beautiful pas- 
sage I oftentimes use at the close of our evening 
service, a new feeling and idea ? "Unto him who is 
able to keep you from falling, and to present you 
faultless before the presence of his glory with ex- 
ceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be 
glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now 
and ever. Amen." 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION OF 
MAN'S CAPABILITIES 



He preached Jesus and the resurrection. — Acts 

17: 18. 



I 



Ill 

THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION OF 
MAN'S CAPABILITIES 

The Church of Christ exists for the sake of main- 
taining in the world great truths, rooted in great 
facts. Once let go of the facts, and the truths for 
which they stand will evaporate into thin air. Of 
these facts, none can be greater than that of the 
resurrection from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The evidences of that resurrection were such 
that the fact became the foundation of the Church, 
the inspiration of the apostles, the illumination of 
life itself. The resurrection produced such a change 
in the character of the apostles that, from being 
timid, discouraged, and perplexed men, they became 
unsubduable and unconquerable heroes. How im- 
measurably important this fact is, may be gathered 
from the language of St. Paul : "If Christ hath not 
been raised ... ye are yet in your sins. Then they 
also that are fallen asleep in Christ have perished.'' 

Apart from the resurrection, the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth is unintelligible. The resurrection gives 
it finish, completeness, and unity. Why should the 
innocent suffer with the guilty? The resurrection 
of Jesus gives the answer. As we see the life of 



32 GLAD TIDINGS 

Jesus now, it is a whole, not a fragment. The argu- 
ment from the beautiful wholeness of the life is one 
of the subtlest, but one of the most convincing argu- 
ments for the validity of the several parts which go 
to make the whole. Whenever you find anything 
in the parts which harmonizes with the whole, you 
may rest assured of its genuineness. 

I do not propose to w^aste your time this morn- 
ing in reminding you of anything which sceptics 
have advanced why they should not believe in our 
Lord's resurrection. It is never of the slightest use 
offering truth to people who do not want to receive 
it. Whenever there is hunger, bread is appreciated. 
Wherever there is thirst, water is valued. When- 
ever men have an appetite for the *^bread of life,'* 
they will find it and it will taste good. To me the 
resurrection of our Lord is a great and glorious 
fact, full of revelation which we all need. The New 
Testament presents that fact in the most impressive? 
way, because in the most literal way, the historical 
way; or, as St. John puts it: ''That which we have 
seen and heard declare we unto you." The New 
Testament presents that fact in the most impressive 
honest men, who gave their lives in attestation of 
their honesty. 

But these facts are simple and profound. They 
l,^elong, thus, to the child and the man. They have 
depths in them which we need to fathom. No fact 
is simple, so as to be completely understood all at 
once. The word, ''Man," is a very simple word. 
"There is a man," is a very simple utterance, which 
everv child can understand. And vet that word. 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION 33 

''Man/' is so complex that all philosophy and all 
theology and all that is valuable in biology is oc- 
cupied in exploring it. And so, when we assert the 
resurrection of Jesus, we are introduced to an event 
which has more suggestion in it and more meaning 
for you and me than almost any other fact one could 
name. One of the sure signs of a man having 
yielded himself to be led and guided by the Holy 
Spirit of God is this, that these Scriptures become 
increasingly illuminating to him. They are like 
springs that never run dry, but supply fresh, cool 
water every day. 

Now as we look on, this Easter morning, at the 
resurrection fact, the first thought that suggests 
itself is this : That the resurrection is a revelation 
of man's capabilities. The truth about man and his 
destiny can come only through a perfect life. I need 
not stay to argue that. If you think over it long 
enough, the statement will verify itself. Christ's 
life, therefore, is the only adequate and authorita- 
tive revelation as to man and the possibilities of his 
nature ever given to the world. Respecting every 
other life lived here, death seemed to have dominion 
over it. It seemed to end. This life of Jesus did 
not end. It continued. It was manifested under 
other and higher conditions. The identical Jesus re- 
appeared, and yet clothed with new powers and pos- 
sibilities. The identical Jesus, yet reembodied. The 
identical Jesus, yet no longer imprisoned, as we are, 
in this ''body of humiliation." His life did not end. 
It kept on and on and under higher and nobler con- 
ditions. He could make himself visible. He could 



34 GLAD TIDINGS 

retire into invisibility. There was a marvelous 
change in him and that change was a prophecy of 
what all his disciples would be beyond the event 
w^e call death. 

This revelation inspired them for their work. It 
took away the fear of "death. To be absent from 
the body would be to be as the Lord. That made 
them rather court martyrdom than fear it. When- 
ever you see a change as great as this come over 
men, something must be found to account for it — 
something sufficient. All the evangelists and apos- 
tles give us about the events associated with the 
resurrection of Jesus is suflficient to account for this 
marvelous change in feeling and thought and life. 
Man does not die when he disappears from our 
view. He lives on in a new and more glorious em- 
bodiment. "If there is a natural body, there is also 
a spiritual body." There are hidden capabilities in 
man which never develop into actualities so long as 
he is confined within the limitations of this mortal 
body. Even science teaches us that. 

One illustration will suffice. Our power of hear- 
ing is confined within a certain range of aerial vi- 
brations. Above and below that range we cannot 
hear. There are sounds in creation far more exquis- 
ite than we ever hear, above and below the range 
to which we are limited. There is ravishing music 
which we have not the competence to detect. Above 
and below the limit of our hearing faculty all is, so 
far as we are concerned, silence. Death means the 
removal of these limitations. It meant that in the 
case of Tesus of Nazareth. And doubtless it will 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION 35 

mean something similar in the experience of all who 
are Christ's. 

A legitimate inference from all this seems to me 
to be that in regard to the question of personal im- 
mortality the Christian disciple has an immense ad- 
vantage. So far as he receives his divine Master 
as an infallible teacher on life questions, he has full 
assurance of the continuance of his life into higher 
conditions. They who doubt and distrust have not, 
and cannot have, that full assurance. The utmost 
that mere reasoning has ever attained to has been 
a high probability. But Paul the apostle had full 
assurance and John the divine had full assurance and 
the impulsive and heroic Peter had full assurance. 
And all men in all ages who have done the will of 
Christ and have made a full surrender of themselves 
to be ruled by Christ, have partaken of this full as- 
surance. Our divine Master brought life and im- 
mortality to light. It was in twilight before he 
brought it into broad daylight and made it a con- 
stituent part of the gospel message. The resur- 
rection of Christ was a revelation of the capabilities 
which lie slumbering in the nature of man. 

In the second place, the resurrection of Jesus 
was a revelation of the power of God. This is the 
aspect under which it is presented to us in several 
memorable utterances of the apostles. Let us recall 
one or two : "That I may know him and the power 
of his resurrection,'' was the apostle Paul's aspira- 
tion. And in that most suggestive and meaty of 
all his letters — the one to the Ephesians — he 
writes of ''that working of the strength of his might 



36 GLAD TIDINGS 

which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him 
from the dead and made him to sit at his right hand 
in the heavenly places." 

When I have been troubled in mind and heart 
over the fearful cruelties which have been perpe- 
trated in this world by violent and merciless men, 
a certain word of our Lord has often come to my 
memory, and out of it I have got no end of comfort. 
It is this : "Be not afraid of them who kill the body, 
and after that have no more that they can do." Has 
it ever occurred to you how much of the wickedness 
of life is made possible through our being associated 
for a certain number of years with a material body ? 
There is a limit to all these crimes. When the old 
Palestinian Jews crucified Jesus, they had done their 
utmost and worst. When men martyred Peter and 
Paul, they had done their worst. There was **no 
more that they could do." When I read the history 
of wars and all the diabolic cruelties attending them, 
such a passage as this I have read comes to my re- 
lief and saves my faith in God. And the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus, with all its attendant circumstances, 
is an enormous comfort to my staggering faith, for, 
though it does not clear away the fog which hangs 
over much of our human life, it reveals that to all 
forms of diabolic cruelty there are limitations which 
are soon reached. There is an end. There is an 
"after this." There is only so much which bad men 
can do. 

Our divine Master Had lived within the limita- 
tions of our human life. He had endured all those 
humiliations which depress and degrade sensitive 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION 37 

souls. He had been treated with the most super- 
cilious contempt. He had known what it was to 
be betrayed by a Judas. He had seen a fickle popu- 
lace, on whom he had rained blessings, turn upon 
him in disdain: crying, '^HosannaT' one day, and 
"Crucify him !'' the next. He had been mocked by 
Herod ; scourged by Pilate ; bedecked with the laugh- 
ing malignity of the thorn crown; spat upon by a 
ribald soldiery — all the most dreadful human ex- 
periences had been his. But it was all over. He had 
proved that all the combined powers of wickedness 
were weak- — contemptibly weak — compared with 
the power of God. He was lifted into a state beyond 
the power of persecution. Scribes, Pharisees, Sad- 
ducees, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas — no longer could 
these touch him. He was beyond their power. All 
his weary life was vindicated. He was proved to 
be what he asserted himself tO' be. 

If we had no gospel of the resurrection to 
preach, we should have no gospel at all. If Calvary 
ended the life of Jesus, over it would hang an im- 
penetrable cloud whose Stygian darkness would turn 
our earth into a hell. The resurrection of our di- 
vine Master is an imperious necessity to belief in all 
and everything which went before it. In no single 
fact of it was the life of Jesus a fanaticism or a mis- 
take. It is an evidence that there is a power stronger 
than disease, stronger than death, stronger than 
hell, stronger than all the confederated diabolisms 
of evil men. I don't wonder that bad men should 
want death to be the end of all things, because ''after 
that they have no more that they can do.'' 



38 GLAD TIDINGS 

In the third place: It is necessary for us to rec- 
ognize that the triumph of our divine Master is the 
triumph of all who are united with him by a living 
faith. 

This idea is so repeatedly cropping up in the let- 
ters of St. Paul as to make us feel how valuable it 
was for him as a self-support in his work and as 
comforting and enheartening others. Jesus rose not 
for himself alone. He never did anything for him- 
self alone. He rose and reappeared for the sake of 
his disciples. "The last enemy that shall be abol- 
ished is death," wrote Paul. He had learnt that 
from the risen Christ. He had learnt what death 
meant — departure, change, liberation, enfranchise- 
ment, exaltation. The resurrection had, as it were, 
entered into him. Therefore he writes : ''If then ye 
were raised together with Christ, seek the things 
that are above." 

''Raised together with Christ !" — what strange 
language! Truly, until we have had a genuine 
Christian experience, all language of apostles must 
be strange to us. Take up a book of the higher 
mathematics — how strange the language is, till 
one has had a mathematical experience. Take up a 
book of botany — how strange the language, until 
we have roamed the fields in the company of men 
who are familiar with every leaf and flower and 
tree and the laws of their growth. I wonder if you 
will misunderstand me if I say that nothing ever 
comes to a man simply for his own sake. It is that 
he may be of greater use to somebody else. There 
is no such thing as individual righteousness — there 



J 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION 39 

cannot be. Because righteousness means the being 
in right relations to others. Everything that Jesus 
did and suffered, he did and suffered because he so 
loved God that he wanted to save men from the de- 
struction they were bringing upon themselves. 
"Raised together with Christ'' — that means so 
identified with Christ that all his experiences become 
sympathetically yours. The sign that you are 
identified with Christ, according to the apostle, is 
this : ^'Ye seek the things that are above.'' The true 
Christian life has the resurrection note as its domi- 
nant. The true Christian note is not one of defeat, 
but of triumph. 

Let us take heed, we Christian disciples, that our 
life is not spent on the wrong side of the resurrec- 
tion event. The resurrection is not an event out- 
side of us on the page of history, to be simply read 
about and credited as any other well-attested 
event is. It has to be a power in us. It has to be 
a vitalized seed, sown in our minds and hearts, to 
reanimate our whole nature, to give us new hopes, 
new energies, new anticipations, a great expectancy 
which no one can have who has only his own un- 
illumined reason and judgment to depend upon in 
the crisis hours of life. I don't believe it is possible 
in our day, when every fool and every ignoramus 
and every conceited mountebank can get his half- 
baked opinions printed and circulated through news- 
papers and magazines — especially if he has money 
to pay for them — in such a day, I do not believe it 
is possible for any one who is not ruled mentally 
and affectionately by Christ, to get an assurance of 



40 GLAD TIDINGS 

continuing life after death. It requires an enlarged 
mind and a purified soul for such a truth to find a 
home in. 

There is an immense difference between speculat- 
ing about Christ and believing in Christ — all the 
difference between talking about a man and living 
with him. We can never believe that Christ has 
conquered the powers of evil for us, until we realize 
that he has conquered the powers of evil in us. For, 
after all, man's own nature is the great battle-ground 
where scribes and Pharisees and Pilate and Herod 
and Caiaphas and Judas are warring against the su- 
prem.acy of Christ. I mean that in every man who 
does not worship the Christ, there is that for which 
all these men stood. The men who crucified Christ 
in those days are no worse than the men who cru- 
cify him in our days. Sooner or later they too will 
experience similar shame and humiliation of defeat. 

How strange it is that men can live in the same 
country, in the same city, under the same social in- 
fluences ; yet when you ask one man what w^ould be 
the greatest loss that could possibly come to him, 
his answer would be : '*To lose my faith in Christ 
and in all the high hopes and expectations which are 
mine through him." The other man, his next-door 
neighbor, would never think of such an answer. He 
sets no value on God's greatest gift to humanity. 
He cannot be brought back to thoughtfulness or 
seriousness about the matter. Seemingly he has 
neither mind enough, nor heart enough, nor con- 
science enough, to give any response to the appeal 
which the risen Christ makes to our humanity. To 



I 



THE RESURRECTION A REVELATION 41 

the first man, the mental condition of the second 
man is inexpHcably mysterious. The first man has 
the inward assurance that *'to be absent from the 
body is to be present with the Lord/' The second 
man fives his fife in doubt and fear, with no inward 
confidence, befieving, if he ever thinks about it, that 
he and his mortal body are one and the same and 
that when it dies, he dies. Anything else is impos- 
sible to him. Truly godliness hath ^'promise of the 
life which now is, and of that which is to come.'' 
But to those of us who are genuine disciples of the 
Christ, the first words spoken on the Resurrection 
Morn are newly addressed to us to-day : "And they 
departed quickly . . . and ran to bring his disciples 
word. And behold, Jesus met them, saying. All 
hail." And to these words of the Resurrection 
Morn, we may add others: "Let not your heart be 
troubled : believe in God, believe also in me. In my 
Father's house are many mansions. . . . And if I go 
and prepare a place for you, I come again and will 
receive you unto myself; that where I am, there 
ye may be also." 

These were the inspiring and comforting words 
the divine Master spoke to his disciples and speaks 
to us through them. Can we receive them? Can 
we make them our own? In these frivolous days 
in which we have to live, in these deceiving and de- 
ceitful days, when outsides have such a strange be- 
witchment over us, when money seems everything 
and character nothing, when freedom is idoHzed 
and righteousness is spurned, when doubts of God's 
righteousness and man's accountability are sown 



43 GLAD TIDINGS 

broadcast, when there seems to be a conspiracy to 
take from us, not only our Bible, which made our 
fathers great, heroic men; but even our Christ, 
whom they worshiped as the infallible God, mani- 
fest in the flesh — in such days as these, is there 
not a call, deep and loud, to every genuine Chris- 
tian disciple to be loyal to the Christ and all he 
stands for? 

No man who clings with the faith of his heart to 
the conquering Christ, need be troubled for his fu- 
ture. We may not be able to achieve that high state 
to which the heroic apostle of the Gentiles reached 
when he wrote those magnificent strains in the fif- 
teenth chapter of First Corinthians. Such a grand 
experience belongs only to the man whose life has 
been a sacrifice, not to such commonplace lives as 
you and I live. And yet there are hours, even for 
us, when we rise above our doubts and above our 
fears, when a Te Deiim sings itself in our spirits 
and the love of God comes into our souls like a June 
morning. 

What hours are those? Are they not the hours 
when God's Christ has become everything to us? 
Those are the resurrection hours. Those are the 
hours of triumph. No one but a Christian believer 
can have them and he only when his mood is this : 

''Rock of Ages, cleft for me ! 
Let me hide myself in Thee." 

Then he exults with Paul and sings: ''But thanks 
be to God, who giveth us the victory through our 
Lord Jesus Christ." 



MAKING MAN 



And God said, Let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness. — Gen. 1:26. 



IV 

MAKING MAN 

I can never read these early chapters of Genesis 
without being filled with wonder at their richness. 
The moment you try to make them dry literal prose 
they are full of impossibilities. Lift them from the 
dead level of prose and let them become to you 
poems, allegories, prophetic visions, and they throb 
with life. 

Has it never occurred to you how much of Nature 
itself is poetry and picture? There is so much in 
Nature that is not usable for growing vegetables 
and raising kitchen stuff. Indeed, you can do' very 
little with it. The painter can paint it. The poet 
can sing it. Wordsworth, with an eye for the 
beauty and romance of the commonplace, becomes 
almost a mere literalist among poets, simply telling 
you, in the language of everyday life, what he sees, 
and lo ! a new school of poetry starts into life. God 
has filled the world with unusable things — things I 
mean you can't eat, or make intO' clothes. And lo! 
the man whose faculties are all asleep — all except 
his money-making faculties — complains, as Judas 
did when the woman broke her box of aromatics 
and anointed the feet of Jesus, ''Wherefore this 
waste ?'' 



46 GLAD TIDINGS 

If, when we get a Bible for humanity it 
should be, like the earth w^hich lies outside us, 
full of poetry and allegory, is it not what we should 
expect ? 

No end of confusion has come in the teaching of 
Bible truth from the non-recognition of its literary 
form. Our very reverence has misled us. The old 
Hebrews used to count every verse and every letter 
of ever}^ verse in their sacred scriptures, so that if 
anyone in transcribing them put in anything or 
left out anything they would know it. That was 
reverence. And it ser\'ed its purpose. Superstition 
has not seldom been a most useful ser^^ant of Truth. 
The time comes, however, when ever}1:hing has to 
stand on its own merits. From a great building the 
scaffolding is taken down. All the props and sup- 
ports are removed. And if then the building cannot 
stand alone it falls. External evidence for the in- 
spiration of Scripture is part of the scaffolding that 
has had to be removed. Eventually ever}'thing has 
to be judged by its internal evidence. And no one 
has yet been able to account for the marvelous, en- 
tirely unparalleled knowledge of human nature 
there is in Holy Writ except on the assumption that 
men spake from God, being moved by the Holy 
Spirit. 

Of course, it goes without saying, that we must 
be under the guidance of the same Spirit, if we are 
to interpret it aright. "If ye then, being evil, know 
how to give good gifts unto your children, how 
much more shall your Father who is in heaven give'' 
the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? 



MAKING MAN 47 

Now it is marvelous to find this sentence I have 
taken as the leading thought of our discussion at 
the very beginning of our Bibles. And yet that is 
its place. It tells us what God is going to do in all 
the human history which is to follow : "Let us make 
man in our image, after our likeness." 

Prior to this there was another resolve — ''Let 
us make an earth !" And what an earth it is ! How 
long did it take to make it ? We cannot tell. Crea- 
tion is a process. Formerly men assumed it was 
an instantaneous appearance. "He spake and it was 
done; he commanded and it stood fast." It still re- 
mains true, however, "By the word of the Lord were 
the heavens made; and all the host of them by the 
breath of his mouth." It still remains true that 
above all processes and behind all processes is a per- 
sonal God, that being the great lesson of the early 
chapters of Genesis. 

Which is the greater, man or his habitation? Our 
Lord answers that question when he asks another: 
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the 
whole world, and lose his own soul?" How long 
does it take to make a man? We know that it has 
taken ages of slow development to make a world: 
how long does it take to make a man, a man capable 
of holy thought and holy feeling which a world 
is not? Is the Adam of the book of Genesis the 
man contemplated? We are disposed to say, 
"Certainly not," any more than the first outline 
sketches of one of Turner's pictures is the completed 
canvas. 

Adam was onlv the foundation of the house, the 



48 GLAD TIDINGS 

first course of stone on which the whole building 
was to be imposed. His history proves it. From 
some Adam the whole human race has been evolved. 
But every generation has had something added. 
How long does it take to make a humanity ? There 
is no answer. The process is going on, but it is not 
perfected. A man had to be evolved who should 
illustrate the whole before the correct idea of a man 
could have place in humanized mind. ''The first 
man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam 
became a life-giving spirit." Through the animal 
to the mental; through the mental to the spiritual; 
that was the direction of the process. Man is man 
just so far as he is spiritual — no farther. Never 
is he God's man, never does he answer to the di- 
vine ideal until he is responsive to that Christ who 
stands for the accomplished work. Only he — the 
man who is responsive to the Christ — is in the di- 
vine image, after the divine likeness. 

The effectuation of manhood, then, demands the 
worship of the Christ. Anything lower is inefficient. 
*'Am I a man?'' I don't know. You are of this 
species apparently — as Carlyle would say: "A 
forked radish with a curiously carved head." God's 
idea of a man is Christ. A real, genuine, normal 
man is (according to St. Paul) one "conformed to 
the image of his son?" "My Father worketh even 
until now, and I work." Worketh even until now 
— at what ? At that which he set out to do — mak- 
ing man. In every generation that is the divine 
work. It is not a work confined to this world. This 
world is the cradle and the school of humanity. But 



MAKING MAN 49 

the earth-school, at the best, is only an elementary 
school. 

Let us cherish the thought that everything to 
which we are legitimately called is tributary to the 
making of man. It is altogether impossible to un- 
derstand the movements of Providence if we lose 
sight of this idea. That dismal science called polit- 
ical economy has no light in it, because it is occu- 
pied with a life which begins at the cradle and ends 
at the grave, occupied with man as a producer of 
wealth simply, with man as *'a hand," not as a soul. 
There is no possibility of understanding life if it 
be confined within these limits — the cradle and the 
grave. I don't know anything more supremely de- 
pressing and ridiculous than the idea that God made 
man with all his rich capabilities, simply that he 
might be a laborer or a merchant or a gardener 
or a mechanic, or that he might make what in these 
commercial days we call a fortune, or in some form 
be the servant and slave of the material — i.e., God 
made the higher to serve the lower! The thing is 
cruel in the extreme. It is unthinkable. To en- 
dow us with all these sympathies, aspirations, capa- 
bilities, hopes, imaginations, anticipations, and then 
set us to work in mines and to be the general scav- 
engers of creation, mere drudges, at best animals in 
a zoological garden, or caged birds with wings for 
which we have no use! 

There is no understanding life on these low levels. 
Under that aspect Deity is little better than an in- 
finite spider. The world is his web and we are the 
flies. A man entertaining ideas like these ought to 



50 GLAD TIDINGS 

be ashamed of setting up as an intelligent rnan. And 
yet there are many who do. But let us be sure that 
the largest ideas — i, e., the ideas that have in them 
height and length and breadth and depth — are al- 
ways the truest. 

I know how often it seems as if our lives were 
undirected and purposeless, as if they were subjects 
of mere accident, as if the word "luck" had some 
justification for its existence, as if some men had 
what we call "good-luck'' and others no luck at all. 
So many men are seemingly in the hands of others, 
as balls to be played with. So many have no settled 
convictions, no high aims, no intelligent self-direc- 
tion. They drift, move with the current, like wreck- 
age on a stream. There is nothing strong about them. 
They have no individuality, no initiative. They are 
easily tempted, easily drawn aside, do simply as oth- 
ers do, have no backbone of seriousness in them and 
simply want to enjoy themselves, as they say. These 
seem to have nothing to do with God and God noth- 
ing to do with them. Such a judgment, however, 
would be a huge mistake. No man can live in God's 
world and be outside God's laws. These are work- 
ing all the time, every moment, and they are working 
retribution and salvation. Yes, retribution in order 
to salvation. 

You will recall that amazing word of St. Paul's, 
speaking of some one who had gone fearfully wrong 
and was incorrigible, that he had determined "to 
deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction 
of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day 
of the Lord Jesus." Living in God's world, under 



MAKING MAN 51 

God's laws, no man can escape God. The old psalm- 
singer of Israel knew that better than many twen- 
tieth century men know it. 

"Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" 

But though no man can escape God and his laws 
and his working, many men think they can. A vast 
number there are who practically say to God : ''We 
desire not the knowledge of thy ways." They do 
not believe that God has anything to do with their 
lives. They accept God, if at all, as a general 
proposition, not as a living energy — not as a su- 
preme, ever-present inspirer of thought and will and 
aspiration. Let us not be hard upon them. The 
thought is so immense that their poor minds can't 
take it in. And as some men are born blind phys- 
ically, so other men are born blind spiritually. To 
save their lives they could not see below the surface 
of anything. As some men have no ear for music, 
and others no eye for beauty, so many men seem to 
have been born with no perception of spirituality. 
But the blind man's description of the earth, and 
the deaf man's report of a symphony or oratorio 
are not to be regarded as authoritative or even in- 
telligent. And so an unspiritualized man's verdict 
on God and life is bound to be dangerously and even 
ludicrously defective. I cherish the belief — it is 
full of comfort — that so long as a man is kept alive 
by God, God has not done with him. The humiliat- 
ing thing with so many of us is this — that before 
ever we can be brought to sanity and wisdom we 



52 GLAD TIDINGS 

have to try the wrong road. We are all more or 
less egotists. A certain amount of egotism, enough 
to enable us to stand upright and say 'T' without 
apology for the first personal pronoun, is necessary. 
But egotism in excess is of the nature of that obtuse 
wilfulness which we see in Milton's Satan. 

I was reading during my vacation weeks Wes- 
ley's journal, and when I came to the report of the 
mother of the Wesleys and her account oi the 
way in which she brought up her large family of 
children, then I knew where was the fountain of 
that unconquerable energy which in Wesley himself 
bordered on the miraculous. I wish you would all 
get to know the mother of the Wesleys. You would 
not like her. She is not a bit like women nowa- 
days. But she is magnificent. She is one of the 
greatest women I ever met. She did more for Eng- 
land in giving to it John and Charles Wesley and 
other members of that family of hers, than all the 
members of Parliament put together. I will quote 
only one sentence from her : ^'In order to form the 
minds of children, the first thing to be done is to 
conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient 
temper. To inform the understanding is a work of 
time, and must, with children, proceed by slow de- 
grees as they are able to bear it; but the subjecting 
the will is a thing which must be done at once and 
the sooner the better." Egotism, wilfulness — these 
in our human nature have to be brought into sub- 
jection to the divine, or we are little better than an- 
archists in God's universe. Like the prodigal son, 
many men are determined to spend the substance 



MAKING MAN 53 

of their souls in riotous living and feed with swine, 
before they come to themselves. 

We must not assume, however, that that is the end 
of them. Between the funeral of Dives and Lazarus 
there must have been an immense difference. All the 
neighborhood turned out to the one, and the chief 
rabbi pronounced, I dare say, an elaborate eulogy. 
Like the French ouvrier of whom we read in 
Victor Hugo, Lazarus may not have had enough to 
buy him a cofifin and might have been buried by the 
parish. Men said no doubt : ''There is a wasted 
life." And the pagans in society said : ''People ought 
to be ashamed of bringing into existence beings 
like that Lazarus !" That is how civilized pagans 
talk in our generation, as in all others, the way in 
which everyone must talk whose view of life begins 
with the cradle and ends with the grave. No more 
tremendous rebuke could have been given to that 
kind of speech, than that which the world's Re- 
deemer gave when he drew the curtain and let the 
imagination follow Lazarus. Everything has to be 
judged by its end and all's well that ends well. 

But where is the end? It is not in sight. We 
Christian disciples are faithless to our Master's 
teaching if we adopt the views and opinions on vital 
and social questions which belong to the semi-pagan- 
ized society in which we live. Because the present 
social order, with its Ji-iggernaut car driven by King 
Mammon, crushes some, shall we say with the mul- 
titude: "They ought never to have been born?" 
Why, to be born is to be made an heir of immor- 
tality! All soul questions, personal questions, have 



54 



GLAD TIDINGS 



to be judged in the light of eternity. Time is but a 
babe held in the lap of eternity. For you and me, it 
is impossible to pronounce any final eulogy or any 
final condemnation on any man. Evermore God is 
still at his work making men. He gives us all a 
certain amount of personal liberty. That is essen- 
tial — essential to the development of individuality, 
essential to the formation of character, essential to 
the creation of a feeling of responsibility without 
which there is no real manhood. We may live the 
fool's life if we choose. We may despise and crush 
that which is highest and divinest in ourselves and 
cultivate only the lower intellectual and commercial 
strata of our nature. We can. We have the liberty. 
We may be decently respectable members of society 
and at the same time blind as bats to the true dignity 
of man. All this is possible, yes, easy; but if we 
think that thus we can escape the divine touch upon 
us, our thinking powers must be of a very low or- 
der. God is still doing his work, in each of us and 
in all men ; he is still making men in his own image, 
after his likeness. 

I don't know how it affects you, but from such 
an interpretation of this text as I have briefly at- 
tempted, bringing to bear on it the evolutionary 
idea, personally I get a great deal of light and com- 
fort. Carlyle once said in that fierce way of his: 
'*My objection to God is, he does nothing.'' And yet 
he had caused to be born into this world a Thomas 
Carlyle, and had made a sun to warm him, and given 
him an earth to live on, and endowed him with great 
intellectual abilities, and made him capable of a mar- 



MAKING MAN 55 

velous influence over the young manhood of his 
age. And yet the great egotist, because he could 
not make things go as he wanted them, cried out: 
''God does nothing!" It is Hke a fractious child, 
provided with a good home and all necessaries of 
life, saying, "Father does nothing." So- small and 
puny are we at the best: "Hast thou not known? 
hast thou not heard? the everlasting God, Je- 
hovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth 
not, neither is weary; there is no searching of his 
understanding." Always, persistently, unconquered, 
unwearied, he is making man in his image, after 
his likeness. 

How long it will take to complete the process, we 
know not. We may judge, however, that things are 
good or bad for us, people are our real friends or 
our enemies, in the degree of the stimulus they 
give to our best nature. Some people we have to 
resist. Others we yield to. But whether the one 
or the other, the process is going on. In all and 
through all is the divine — is God. In this we hope. 
I know that our dissatisfaction with God and with 
life gets no less, rather it becomes more as we 
advance in civilization. From the happiness stand- 
point, the point of mental satisfaction, there is noth- 
ing so disappointing as that kind of progress which 
is simply mechanical and of the outside. We insist 
that God shall make all men comfortable and free 
from care. That is the highest aim of all who be- 
long to the thoughtless crowd. 

Far beyond that is the divine aim. "Let us make 
man in our image, after our likeness." That is the 



56 GLAD TIDINGS 

aim. Arrested development! How many people 
are illustrations of it ! All savages are illustrations. 
So are all ungodly men who are fixed in ungodli- 
ness — unripe fruit — sour apples. ''In our image 
— after our likeness'' — that is the aim, that the 
goal, and there is immense comfort in the feeling 
that God will go on with his work till he gets us 
there. Or, there is but one other alternative^ we 
shall fall to the ground like worm-eaten fruit, or like 
blossoms that never set in fruit. 

"Let us make man in our image." The fulness 
of interpretation of that passage was never possible 
till the Christ came. Now "man" and "Christian" 
are words that measure one another. The worship 
of the Christ, involving subjection of the will and 
service, is the easiest and most expeditious way to 
the attaining the fulness of our manhood. "It is 
not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know 
that if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him." 
If I did not believe that in voicing the Evangel of 
Christ I am cooperating with the Spirit of God, 
moving along the lines of divine evolution for the 
race, my preaching here this morning would be an 
act of stupendous folly. 



THE KING'S OWN 



Know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly 
for himself, — Psalms 4: j. 



V 

THE KING'S OWN 

This is one of those passages which cannot be ex- 
pounded. It can only be illustrated. It contains 
a feeling, an experience, a conviction. It suggests 
dififerences of mental attitude among men toward 
God. All men have some relation towards God. 
Some men have a peculiar relation toward him. 
The great apostle of the Gentiles acknowledges 
this difference of mental attitude when he speaks of 
some men as ^*a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, 
a holy nation,'' i. e., a nation set apart. For the 
root idea of holiness is simply this — ''set apart" — 
as the vessels of the temple were set apart from the 
ordinary drinking vessels of common life. So the 
priests ministering in the temple were set apart from 
the ordinary men engaged in the ordinary employ- 
ments of every-day life. 

In another passage the great apostle speaks of 
the Christ as ''the Saviour of all men, specially of 
them that believe.'' From something which other- 
wise would have come upon them because of uni- 
versal sinfulness, Christ had saved all men; but in 
a more special way was he the Saviour of those who 
believe in him. 

Nowhere in the Bible is there any of that con- 



6o GLAD TIDINGS 

founding of moral distinctions, that immoral uni- 
versalism which is found in some modern theologies. 
Everywhere there is discrimination between the man 
who serveth God and the man who serveth him not. 
There are rewards for some which do not and can- 
not in justice belong to others, as in these words: 
"Every one therefore who shall confess me before 
men, him will I also confess before my Father who 
is in heaven.'' 

Now in the present time, in his inner feeling and 
thinking, the godly man is different from the un- 
godly. The man whose heart-belief in Christ is the 
mainspring of his active life is different from the 
man who has nothing of that belief. As a man's 
wife and children are to him different from all other 
women and children, as a man's friends are to him 
different from men in general, as a man's country 
is to him different from all other countries — so the 
godly man, in God's feeling for him, is different 
from all other men. He is related to God in a dif- 
ferent way from that in which other men are re- 
lated. He is ''godly," i, e., he gives clear evidence 
of having in him something of the divine nature. 
He is a blood-relation, if we may venture to use such 
an expression. 

While we cannot dogmatically and definitely de- 
termine all there is of meaning in passages of this 
order, ''Know that the Lord hath set apart him that 
is godly for himself," yet we can get enough out 
of it for enlightenment and encouragement. We 
may, without presumption, infer that there are in- 
timacies of relationship with the Divine which do 



THE KING'S OWN 6i 

not belong to all. We may infer that it is worth 
while to be godly. We may infer that in the Di- 
vine dealings with man there are discriminations; 
that all men in God's sight are not morally alike; 
that between loyalty and disloyalty there is all the 
difference between what Carlyle would call the 
Eternal Yea and the Everlasting No. 

Now there is a current in our day which is run- 
ning pretty strong, obliterating the ancient land- 
marks, which we need carefully to watch. It levels 
everything it touches. Perhaps I may make you un- 
derstand what I mean if I say that it, this current 
of which I speak, has a tendency to obliterate moral 
distinctions. Between the best man and the worst 
there is no radical difference. Sin is simply a mis- 
take — a mental missing of the mark. It is an in- 
cident in life, or an accident merely. It is the 
product of heredity or environment. The sinner is 
to be pitied, not blamed. At the last, everybody will 
come out about right. Some people may go a very 
much longer way round to get to their final heaven ; 
but they are sure to get there. There may be on 
this roundabout way, somewhere, a hell through 
which a man may have to pass, for as Browning puts 
it, "There may be heaven, there must be hell ;" but 
as in Bunyan's Slough of Despond — there are steps 
in it and a way out on the other side. Such ideas 
will help you to understand what is meant when I 
say there is a strong current running nowadays, 
obliterating ancient landmarks which we do well to 
watch. 

Now it is always dangerous and usually mislead- 



62 GLAD TIDINGS 

ing, to get your conclusions first and then make your 
premises fit them. It is very much Hke balancing a 
pyramid on its ajDex. In order to do it you have 
to put all around it boulders that do not properly 
belong there. And it is always unscientific to get 
away from facts. The scientific mood is assumed 
to be the dominant mood of our time. And so far 
as it keeps us rigidly to facts, it does us an immense 
service. To get great sweeping theories and then 
to compel our facts to come in and support them, or 
rather (as is so often done) to keep the facts wait- 
ing outside and to inflate our theories, until they 
have the dimensions of a great balloon, with gaseous 
opinions which seem to have very little relation to 
facts — this can never be approved as scientific. 
And yet how much of this sort of thing there is! 
If science had done nothing else for us than to com- 
pel us to respect the common, every-day facts with 
which we are familiar, its service to our generation 
would be beyond price. We shall never get at truth, 
say the scientific men, except by sticking to facts 
and interpreting them as far as we can. I, for one, 
am willing to accept that position. 

We must remember, however, that there are sev- 
eral classes of facts — facts external to us and facts 
internal, facts of revelation and facts of experience, 
facts material and facts mental and spiritual. A fact 
is something you cannot evaporate, something which 
stands its ground rigidly and immovably. The life 
of Jesus in Galilee and Judea is as much a fact as 
is the sun in the heavens. The life of Paul is as 
much a fact as the life of George Washington. 



THE KING'S OWN 63 

When the old Hebrew wrote, ''I was brought low 
and he saved me/' that was as much a fact of ex- 
perience as anything which has happened to any one 
of us. We must not confine our facts to one class. 
That is unscientific. The facts about sin and about 
vice, the demoralizing effects certain courses of life 
produce upon body and mind, are as rigid and in- 
disputable as the fact that undigested food will pro- 
duce some kind of illness. If anyone who wishes 
to know what sin is, and what vice is, will take all 
the facts and interrogate and interpret them, he need 
not go to theological science for his judgments. 

And so of everything else. All evil is not sin. 
Sin has the ingredient of will in it. It is personal. 
But there is a great deal of evil which is not per- 
sonal. It is inherent in the conditions in which we 
live. To illustrate — I would get rid of all drunk- 
enness if I could; but I cannot. I would have law 
and order prevail universally, if it were in my 
power ; but it is not. Lawlessness is an evil of huge 
and threatening proportions; but I cannot change 
it. I would have justice prevail everywhere between 
man and man ; but I am all but powerless. I would 
abolish war as the outlet of the old barbarism which 
lies like a sleeping and starved tiger in our nature: 
but I cannot. These are enormous evils, but to all 
who have resisted and fought against them they are 
not sins. We have not personally consented to 
them. They are not here by our wish or will. We 
take these facts, just as they present themselves, and 
ask — what influence do they exert on men ? Do 
they make men better or worse? Outside Bedlam 



64 GLAD TIDINGS 

there is but one answer. This is what we may call 
a scientific treatment of sin. We take certain facts 
and conditions and note how they work demoral- 
ization and destruction to our human nature. 

But there are other evil conditions than these, 
more interior to our nature, more hidden from ob- 
servation — envy, pride, hatred. Note their effect 
upon individuals, note how they work on characters, 
and we are compelled to similar inferences, that they 
are demoralizing, dehumanizing, and destructive. 
Locate sin and evil theoretically and it is possible 
to argue a man out of his fear of them. Do you 
think a good God would punish sin ? Do you think 
a God who is love would punish men for sins which 
come from ignorance and want of experience? The 
answer to which, so long as you keep to the facts, is 
that he does punish them here and now, all our 
theories of what he ought to do, notwithstanding. 
However beautiful and fascinating the theories may 
be, facts refuse to budge in their testimony that he 
does here and now punish sins against the body and 
sins against the mind and sins against the moral 
nature of man. There is no getting away from the 
facts. Nor do I see how we are to get away from 
this conviction, that if he did not so punish sins, 
the words ''a good God" and a ''God of love" would 
have no meaning. 

Our Lord's teaching is surely this — that God 
loves the sinner and hates the sin and at any cost 
w^ill deliver the sinner from his sins. He loves the 
sinner, not because he is a sinner, but because he is 
a man. And all sin unmans and dehumanizes. 



THE KING'S OWN 65 

Whatever unmans and dehumanizes is sin, and so 
I say to the fine and fascinating theories which have 
in them a tendency to obHterate distinctions and dis- 
criminations — the demand is upon us to stick 
resolutely to facts, i. e., to treat our theories scien- 
tifically. That is the demand of the age in which 
we live. 

"The Lord hath set apart him that is godly for 
himself." I have said that the life of Jesus Christ 
is as much a fact as is the sun in the heavens. To 
him primarily the language of our text applies. 
Emphatically he is the highest type of a godly life. 
That life is intended to have the same influence on 
our spirits (our mind and heart and will) as the sun 
in the heavens has on our bodies. Without the 
light of heaven surrounding our bodies and pene- 
trating them with its rays, no man can live in health. 
Was there not immense meaning in our Lord's 
words "I am the light of the world: he that fol- 
loweth me shall not walk in the darkness." Does 
it not sometimes seem an amazing thing to you that 
there are men and women to whom the personality 
of Jesus is not supremely fascinating? One loses 
all patience with the low intellectualism of men who 
cannot see that Christ is "such a person as men 
could not have imagined if they would, and would 
not have imagined if they could. He is neither 
Greek myth nor Hebrew legend." For as one has 
said : "Beyond the teaching of Jesus thought cannot 
go. A God better than the Father of Christ is for 
man inconceivable. A diviner interpretation of hu- 
man existence than that of Christ is unimaginable. A 



66 GLAD TIDINGS 

higher or greater spirit than Jesus Christ is unthink- 
able." And yet there are those who meet his teach- 
ings and his claims with all manner of repudiations 
and objections. I said a moment or two ago that 
a fact is something you cannot evaporate ; something 
which stands its ground rigidly and immovably. 
In the light of this definition is not this Jesus the 
fact of facts in the history of our human race? 

There is another tendency in our time which needs 
to be watched carefully — the tendency to leave 
Christian principles of conduct and revert to a cer- 
tain sort of modified paganism. It is found among 
intellectual and scholarly men as well as among rich 
and well-to-do men who have no pretensions to be 
ranked among intellectual and scholarly men. 
Among the former it comes from a new and more 
serious attention to what we may call nature-studies. 
Most scholarly men in our day are specialists. They 
have no authority beyond the limits of the sciences 
(geology, biology, astronomy, and so on) to which 
they give their almost exclusive attention. The drift 
towards paganism among the rich and well-to-do 
comes from their absorption in material things, 
from having too much money and too much of those 
things which money can purchase. Godliness, in its 
most pleasing expression, is generally most at home 
with men and women who have neither poverty nor 
riches. These God seems to have set apart socially 
to do his work in the w^orld. It is as our Lord said, 
''The care of the world and the deceitfulness of 
riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.'' 
But this I have observed, in literature and life, that 



II 



THE KING'S OWN 67 

whenever men have no perception of the moral and 
spiritual supremacy of Christ, whenever they do not 
attain to that perception, or, having once had it 
dimly, it has faded out from their thinking and feel- 
ing, they are almost certain to go wrong in almost 
every other direction. They are like men wander- 
ing in the night along an unknown road with noth- 
ing but a lamp of their own lighting. Their 
thoughts become paganized, their sympathies dulled 
and contracted. They lose that inspiration which 
comes to the godly soul. The hope of immortality 
vanishes. They come to a sort of half-belief that 
for man and dog there is the same ending to life. 
The future is a bewilderment, a blank, and a dread. 
Intellectual conceit is blinding; it is only a form of 
that pride which God resisteth, and is as fatal to 
faith in God as is the slavish worship of the material. 
I hope you see that I am moving steadily in the 
realm of common, every-day, indisputable facts. Oh, 
I have seen some beautiful illustrations of our text — 
that the Lord setteth apart him that is godly for him- 
self — among people who have had to suffer for 
their very excellences. There came to my memory 
as I was musing over this discourse the case of a 
woman I knew who had a brute of a husband, who 
insulted and abused her most shamefully. She was 
one of the godly whom the Lord had set apart for 
himself. Christ was her light. Duty was her 
watchword. In uncomplaining sweetness of spirit, 
she did her daily task, as ever in the great Task- 
master's eye. It was heaven to her to get to church 
on Sunday, for there she got tlie bread of life on 



68 GLAD TIDINGS 

which she fed for the week. It was a haven of 
peace from perpetually recurring week-day storms. 
Year in and year out she lived her life of sweet, 
gentle, uncomplaining godliness, lavishing all her 
care on the brute whom she called husband, and all 
her affection on her children. The contrast between 
the godliness and the ungodliness of that household 
was painful to every sensitive soul. If ever woman 
took up her cross daily and followed Christ, that 
w^oman did. To anyone but a godly woman the con- 
ditions would have been intolerable. And there are 
those — yes, many of them — whom the Lord hath 
set apart for himself. How much that means, I 
don't know. As I said at the start, our passage can- 
not be expounded. It can only be illustrated. It 
suggests very much more than it says. 

In the English army is a regiment called the 
King's Own. Its place is near the monarch. 
There is very little that is speculative in the imag- 
ination that among the innumerable nationalities 
and peoples of the other world there may be some 
who are the King's own. Said our Lord to his dis- 
ciples : ''No longer do I call you servants. . . . but I 
have called you friends." I have made revelations 
to you I have not made to others. ''All things that 
I have heard from my Father, I have made known 
unto you." 

It becomes us to recognize that every generation 
has its own special currents running through it 
which need watching. I have referred to two only 
— the one which tends to obliterate the ancient land- 
marks between sin and virtue and reduce everything 



THE KING'S OWN 69 

to a dead and undiscriminating level. That is one 
— an immoral universalism. The other is the tend- 
ency in society to leave Christian principles of con- 
duct and revert to paganism. Drummond saw that 
the reversion to the pagan type of thinking was 
inevitable, when once Christ lost his hold on the hu- 
man heart. These two tendencies exist. A tend- 
ency is, of course, very noiseless and very subtle in 
its working. Only the spiritually sensitive observe 
it. We can detect it by comparing a not remote past 
with the present. Then we perceive that a change 
has come over society, even since some of us were 
born. The young men and women are brought 
up with less care — with more easy tolerance and 
laxity. Godliness is more generally tabooed. Its 
naturalness, its beauty, its refinement, its effect on 
character are not perceived. Only when we put a 
straight stick by the side of a crooked one do we 
perceive its crookedness. Only when we get a fine 
day with blue sky and a sunlight that exhilarates 
and warms, do we recognize what a miserable day 
the preceding was with all its fog and drizzle and 
slush. And only when we put the Christ into soci- 
ety and compare his principles with its, can we see 
how far astray it has gone. 

Is godliness worth while? It is impossible for 
any spiritually sensitive man to close his eyes to the 
fact that in our own day an increasing number of 
men seem blinded to the nature of godliness — what 
it is and what the loss of it would mean to us ? A 
brute cannot be godly, a man can. I know of no 
other line where you can draw your discrimination. 



70 GLAD TIDINGS 

The loss of godliness must therefore mean a steady 
decline towards brutishness. 

What is it we want in our churches? May not 
all our wants be put in three words — light, 
heat, power? But are these not the very things 
necessary to the comfort and efficiency of life in 
society? We have gone through quite an evolution 
in our application to various sources of supply. Our 
most primitive experience was in cutting down our 
timber and turning it into light and heat and later 
into power. Then there was a very early attempt 
to use water-power, a very simple application at first. 
Now w^e have harnessed Niagara. Then we called 
on the wind to grind our corn and waft our ships 
across the sea. Then came the great era of coal. 
Then from coal gas was evolved and later taken 
ready-made from the earth. Greatest of all, so far, 
is the era of electricity, the most mysterious and 
powerful thing that man has handled yet, an invisible 
presence. How much has sunlight had to do with 
the creation of all these forces? In all probability 
far more than any of us have any idea of. As sun- 
light to heat and warmth and powder, so godliness 
to the light and heat and power of mental and moral 
life. The nature of godliness — the value of god- 
liness — would that we could grasp it more intelli- 
gently and firmly. Then it would not be difficult for 
us to believe that ''the Lord hath set apart him that 
is godly for himself.'' 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 



Now ye arc the body of Christy and severally mem- 
bers thereof, — / Cor. 12: ^7. 



VI 

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 

There cannot be a question that to some of our 
friends church membership does not mean much. It 
does not carry with it the ideas of allegiance and 
obHgation. ReHgion does not mean primarily piety, 
but fidelity. There is no faith where there is no 
faithfulness. 

Let us try if we cannot bring ourselves into a 
more intelligent state of mind in regard to this mat- 
ter. In order to do so, let us remind ourselves of 
what the church is. That we may get out of the re- 
gion of controversy and not gO' astray, we will take 
the great apostolic idea "the church which is his 
body." We are members of his body. This is start- 
ling language. Of course it is mystical. It suggests 
a present union of Christ with his people which is 
more intimate than any of us realize. 

But need we be surprised at such an idea? It is 
figured to us in Nature. There is no question that 
the union of the sun with our earth is so intimate 
that apart from it the earth would be a solid block 
of ice. A body is the temporary dwelling-place of 
a spirit. The church is the dwelling-place of Christ's 
spirit, or, rather, let us put it more strongly and say, 



74 GLAD TIDINGS 

the incarnation of his spirit. Now, a spirit may be 
in a body which clogs and hinders its free action. 
With a rheumatic body, or paralyzed body, the 
spirit in man cannot w^alk abroad and do deeds of 
kindness. I don't wonder the old church sexton 
should say there was something worse than atheism 
and that was rheumatism. If Christ's spirit has to 
express itself, do its work in the world, through his 
body which is the church, its limitations must neces- 
sarily be the limitations belonging to the body 
through which it has to work. So far as this time 
life of ours is concerned, every truth has to get itself 
incarnated in some man or woman before it can 
work. The reason why Dickens' Christmas Carol 
was so effective was because he took that idea and 
dramatized it into the crippled Tiny Tim and the 
heartless Old Scrooge. The apostolic idea of the 
Christian Church is the body of Christ. All bodies 
ecclesiastical claiming to be churches have to be 
tested as to their genuineness by what Christ him- 
self was. 

The Church is a teaching body — for He w^as 
a great teacher. It is a redeeming body, a body 
which saves souls from death and hides a multi- 
tude of sins, for He was a redeemer. It is a con- 
soling body to men afflicted with sins and sorrows, 
for He was a great consoler. It is a missionary 
body, for He w^as a great evangelist, a great mis- 
sionary. Moreover, can we not add that the Church 
must expect persecution and misrepresentation, for 
He was misrepresented and persecuted, and it is 
enough for the disciple that he be as his ]\Iaster. 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 75 

It must expect to suffer for the truth, for He was 
a sufferer. But in all its misrepresentation and per- 
secution it must cherish the assurance of ultimate 
victory, for the mark of the Spirit of Christ is this. 
It may be crucified, apparently, and buried, but it 
will rise again the third day. There has scarcely 
been an age in which men have not been talking of 
Christianity as an exploded superstition and lo, 
when these conceited intellectualists had got it de- 
cently buried, it breaks out again, like a sleeping vol- 
cano. Why, as late as 1736, one of the most famous 
books of the eighteenth century, Butler's Analogy, 
which was addressed to the deists, has these words 
at its opening : "It is come, I know now how, to be 
taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity 
is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it 
is now at length discovered to be fictitious.'' The 
words had scarcely been penned before the country 
of England was aflame with religious revival. 

It is so always. The darkest hour of night is that 
before the dawn. Against the true Church of Christ 
*'the gates of hell shall not prevail." We need be 
in no doubt as to the spirit and temper of a genuine 
Christian Church. The sovereignty of Christ over 
it is absolute and supreme. But like as Judas was 
in the Church but not of it, so any one of us may 
be. The temptation of money and its deceitfulness, 
of fame and its allurements, of pleasure, full of 
broken promises, may be too much for us. As 
Demas forsook Paul, because he loved this present 
age, so it may be with any of us. *Xet him that 
thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." The 



76 GLAD TIDINGS 

condition of church fellowship is fidelity to Christ 
and the principles of life which he stood for. 

A church, then, is a company of faithful, re- 
deemed men, whose sins are forgiven for Christ's 
sake, spiritually-minded men, obedient to him, 
pledged to cooperate with one another to bring his 
kingdom into evidence. 

Do we understand this ? Or, have we some lower 
idea of what a church is, and what it exists for? 
Our Lord, in the most expressive language he could 
use, said "My Church," as if it was something he 
had a special ownership in. When a man says 
''my home," "my wife," "my children," there is an 
affectionate proprietorship in the language. He has 
a relationship to these he has not to others. So 
Christ intimates that while he has such an affection 
for the whole humanity as no one else ever had, 
yet there are some for whom he has special affec- 
tion. They are nearer and dearer to him than are 
others, just as his disciples were dearer to him than 
anyone else in Judea and Galilee. These are not 
ashamed of him. They confess him before men. 
That confession may be timid, speechless almost ; the 
confession of deeds, not words — as with Nicode- 
mus and Joseph of Arimathea, who begged the body 
of Jesus that they might give it honorable burial. 
Probably they saw him die. Then their last doubts 
vanished. They may have heard his language on 
the cross — and have felt as the Roman centurion 
felt, "Truly this was the Son of God!" 

Need I say that the confession of Christ before 
men is of very great value here and now, of much 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 77 

more value than it will be when we see him in his 
glory? I was lunching one day in England with 
an English baronet^ when I noticed at the table a 
man who evidently was not very much used to what 
is called good society. Afterwards, the baronet or 
one of his family, I forget which, told me that that 
man came to any meal in the house whenever he 
felt disposed. In his youth he had stood by the 
baronet when they were boys together and every- 
one had forsaken him. So the baronet now de- 
lighted in confessing him as his friend. There will 
be no courage and no chivalry required to confess 
the glorified Christ. But here and now the confes- 
sion has a value it can never have again. 

We may test the value of an action by giving it 
universality. If all men did as I am doing, what 
would be the condition of the world? If you had 
no Christians in the world and no Christian Church, 
witnessing to God's claims and creating Christian 
conscience and feeling, you would have a perpetual 
French Revolution, with all its horrors ; and the more 
intelligent men became, the worse it would be. Re- 
ligion sobers a man. It gives him self-control. In 
spite of appearances to the contrary, it makes him 
hopeful that justice and righteousness will eventu- 
ally triumph, and that if not here, someivhere, every 
man will get justice done him; that life is not an 
unordered scramble with no direction and guidance. 

If all men were silent as to Christ and his re- 
demptive work, practically there would be no Christ 
in the world and no redemptive work. There would 
be some form of superstition. There would be va- 



7S GLAD TIDINGS 

rious man-invented religions, with no authority. 
There is all the difference in the world between a 
God-given religion and a man-invented religion. 
Mahomet stole his religion out of the Old Testa- 
ment. Then he claimed a supernatural commission, 
and what has been the consequence? Bigotry of 
the fiercest, tyranny of the cruellest — the unspeak- 
able Turk who is the darkest blot on European civili- 
zation. Semi-civilized nations have been frightfully 
inconsistent with the Christian religion. They have 
never used more than half of it. It has been, at 
its best, foully corrupted. And yet, in spite of all 
this, it has given them the intellectual and moral 
leadership of the world. 

Japan has stolen all her improvements from semi- 
Christianized nations. They have taught her how 
to build war-ships and forge arms of destruction of 
the most deadly effectiveness, taught her how to 
build schools and colleges and manufactories; but 
not yet, except in an intelligent minority, has she 
learnt the religion of Jesus. But she will. In the 
nature of the case there can be no compulsion about 
Christianity because its heart is love and considera- 
tion leading to self-sacrifice. Its symbol is not a 
sword, but a cross — a cross which ultimately 
blooms into a crown. Put it beside any other form 
of religion and immediately it is seen as something 
God-given by the side of something man-invented. 
Never am I doing right in regard to anything, un- 
less that which I am doing, if universalized, would 
redeem or in some way bless the world. That is 
the test. The confession of Christ before men, in 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 79 

word and deed, if it became universal, would solve 
the civic and social problems that are everlastingly 
perplexing us. And nothing short of that will settle 
them. 

History itself, if only we read it intelligently, 
would convince us that in every past civilization 
there has been something wanting. Everything that 
culture could do was tried in Greece — Greece the 
most philosophy-loving, the most art-loving nation 
that ever existed. "The glory that was Greece, 
the grandeur that was Rome," it all faded and fell. 
Why? Because both lacked morality. Perhaps 
more than any other nation, France has followed 
in the steps of Greece and Rome. Artistically she 
has followed Greece, and Napoleonism was but 
Caesarism revived. What writes one of the ablest 
modern French writers? Listen. "More than a 
hundred years after the great Revolution; after 
thirty years of a republic, by turns conservative, 
opportunist, radical, and socialist, we find ourselves 
wallowing in the mud of our industrialism, our 
pauperism, our revolts, our wars; with prostitution 
and alcoholism for our joys, the press and politics 
for our activities, and with money and appearance 
for our ideals." The something wanting in every 
civilization where Christ is not enthroned is exactly 
parallel to the something wanting in every heart 
where Christ is not enthroned. The Church of 
Christ has been fearfully misrepresented to the world 
even by its own adherents, and yet, in spite of this, 
it holds the great secret — in spite of all misrepre- 
sentation, it is the hope of the world. 



8o GLAD TIDINGS 

I fear, however, these general remarks do not 
come near enough to us to waken into Hfe our sense 
of personal responsibihty. Each of us members of 
Christ's Church is responsible for an obedience of a 
kind which separates us from the general mob of 
men and women who constitute society. Christian 
discipleship is loyalty. It is a surrender of ourselves 
to be guided and directed by the great Master in all 
the serious things of life. Fidelity to Christ is the 
first thing in the life of every genuine disciple. Con- 
sidering the expectations which the Christian disci- 
ple has, anything less is unreasonable. 

Consider for a moment what these expectations 
are. ( i ) Present illumination. "I am the light of 
the world, he that followeth me shall not walk in 
darkness" — mental darkness. I insist upon this, 
that Christian truth is mental illumination. I insist 
on its intellectual quality. (2) Cleansing from in- 
ner defilement — that is a second expectation. Not 
simply forgiveness of sin. A father might forgive 
his returning prodigal, who yet might remain foul 
in body, foul in mind, foul in spirit. Forgiveness 
is not enough. We all need cleansing. 

This is a truth that I fear we do not grasp as 
firmly and clearly as we ought. You recall perhaps 
the words of the apostle Peter, referring, I think, 
to disciples who had suffered relapse, "Having for- 
gotten the cleansing." You cannot have forgotten 
the passage which has so often been used vulgarly 
and with indecent familiarity, so as to become of- 
fensive to some, ''The blood of Jesus his Son 
cleanse th us from all sin." The blood is the life. It 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 8i 

is a concrete word standing for life, self-sacrificed 
life, life poured out, life offered for others. When 
you say a man shed his blood for his country you 
mean he poured out his life for his country. It 
was the greatest thing he could do. In every man 
there is defilement of some sort. I say "in" every 
man. Men are not virtuous, they are not pure. 
They are not clean within. If you think otherwise, 
I beg you to examine searchingly into your motives 
— why you do this, that, and the other. A filthy 
body is repulsive. But souls may be filthy. We 
have foul thoughts, impure affections, not simply 
vices which are of the flesh, but sins which are 
deeper than vices. "He that hateth his brother is 
a murderer.*' We need washing within — cleans- 
ing. 

Have you ever thought what it means to change 
the temperament of a man, the inward tone of him, 
from craftiness, falseness, insincerity, foul and cor- 
rupted affections, to simplicity, integrity, purity? 
Men say it can't be done. Character is fixed, they 
say, by the shape of a man's forehead, by an in- 
heritance of bad blood and so on. Listen to the 
words of the great German philosopher of the 
pessimists, Schopenhauer: "The wicked man is 
born with his wickedness as much as the serpent 
is with his poison fangs, nor can the former change 
his nature a whit more than the latter." Fatalism! 
bald and beastly fatalism! No recognition that 
man is a spirit open to the influx of the Spirit of 
God! As a matter of fact the change has been 
wrought. Time and again, within my own limited 



•s GLAD TIDINGS 

experience, it has been done. The very worst of 
men have been cleansed — cleansed v^ithin. The 
change had been so great that no words but the old 
Avords will adequately express it: *'born again/' 

You and I cannot do that. God can. He has 
resources of which we know nothing. Our expec- 
tation is that, in his own mysterious way, our liv- 
ing Christ will do it for us. Our business is to hold 
on to him. His business is to do the cleansing. The 
great English preacher, Robert Hall, used to say 
that he never came upon that passage in the Psalms, 
''Thou hast dehvered my soul from death, mine 
eyes from tears, and my feet from falling,'' without 
a lump coming into his throat. And whenever I 
call to memory the passage, ''Unto him that is able 
to keep you from falling, and to present you fault- 
less before the presence of his glory with exceed- 
ing joy," I have often felt myself choking. It 
seems too good to be true. No mere man of Naz- 
areth can do that. It requires a Christ who wields 
divine power to do that. You are perfectly wel- 
come to your rationalized Christ. I don't w^ant him. 
Whoever can cleanse my soul from its hatred, lust, 
envy, malice, and all uncharitableness is divine. 
Oh, what an expectation! To expect full forgive- 
ness and more — cleansing — cleansing — cleans- 
ing! 

But that is not all. Not illumination alone. Not 
cleansing alone. We expect enrichment. We ex- 
pect an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that 
fadeth not away. That is the full realization of 
life. We expect these things. Life would be in- 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 83 

tolerable if we did not expect something — *'a tale 
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifiying 
nothing." Take out of life this expectation and if 
a man be a thoughtful man, he immediately becomes 
a sad man ; and if he be a thoughtless man, he imme- 
diately becomes a bad man. Sadness for thoughtful 
men, badness for thoughtless men — these are the 
feelings which dominate the soul when once these 
great expectations fade out. 

There is nothing which clothes life with dignity 
equal to the thought of regions beyond into which 
this life flows, as rivers into a majestic ocean. Not 
a man, not a woman, not a child, but immediately 
becomes something else than he otherwise could be, 
when credited with a spiritual nature which needs 
a great Beyond for its full expansion. So far from 
our idea of a future life having no influence on the 
present, on every hour and week and month and 
year of it, there is nothing which has so much in- 
fluence. It enriches the present. It puts meaning 
into it. It justifies its severe discipline. The idea 
of an inheritance incorruptible expands mind, heart, 
reason, imagination — everything in man. These 
expectations every Christian disciple has — illumin- 
ation, cleansing, enrichment. And if God be as rep- 
resented to us in Christ, these expectations are not 
unreasonable. 

But I will tell you what is unreasonable — to have 
these expectations and to be ashamed of being the 
avowed disciples of him who has bequeathed them 
to us. It seems to me that if we are doing nothing 
positive for Christ — nothing which involves some- 



i 



84 GLAD TIDINGS 

thing in the way of self-denial on our part, these 
expectations must gradually fade and become weaker 
and weaker. I think one of the saddest experiences 
which comes to every pastor is to see Christian dis- 
ciples gradually fade out from their former spring 
freshness and lose their energy, people of the kind 
to whom St. Paul wrote, "Ye did run well; who 
did hinder you?" — "Demas hath forsaken me, hav- 
ing loved this present world." You hear the break 
in the voice. You see the eyes of the apostle fill 
with tears! Have you ever watched by a beauti- 
ful face far gone in consumption and seen it fade 
from week to week — lapse — lapse — lapse — until 
that strange expression comes which never comes 
but once, and you enter the valley of the shadow of 
death? Such an experience touches the sensibilities 
and makes the heart throb fast. To see a beautiful 
human body fade and fade till the eternal spark of 
the divine which animates it recedes into its own 
spiritual world — it stirs us to the very center. But 
often through the thin physical shadow which does 
duty for a body, there shines a soul all radiant with 
beauty. But to see a human spirit fade and fade 
and fade, become less and less Christly in feeling and 
tone and temper — to see it lose its sympathy and 
its energy and to see its light become dim, the body 
worse and worse, the spirit less and less, till the 
cross of Calvary can produce no throb of resp>onsive 
love in it — to have tasted of "the powers of the 
world to come" and then to have lapsed into 
strengthlessness and uselessness, with those miser- 
able, weak excuses on the lips, which a man ought 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 85 

to have too much manhness to adopt — to have 
lapsed till ever)rthing commands more of our time, 
our feeling, our sympathy, than the grandest and 
sweetest things ever offered to the mind — that is 
a form of consumption sadder than any phys- 
ical consumption can ever be. The death of the 
body is natural. But the death of the soul is un- 
natural, it was never meant to be. And that slow 
decline, that falling away, I have seen in Christian 
disciples, till sympathy with the struggling of hu- 
man souls had seemingly gone — there is some- 
thing about it unnatural — something mysterious 
and unintelligible. 

With such expectations as have been created 
within us, without which life is a meaningless 
struggle for something petty and paltry, which fades 
in the using, with such expectations the very 
smallest demand that can be made on us is loving 
fidelity to him who has undertaken to turn our ex- 
pectations into facts; who has undertaken to il- 
lumine our minds, cleanse our souls from defilement, 
and enrich our lives beyond all we can ask or think. 
If a man would be sure of being mentally led and 
guided, if he would be sure of having his spirit 
cleansed from all its defilement, if he would be sure 
of an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that 
fadeth not away, he must hold on with the death- 
like grip of a drowning man to God's Christ — the 
richest benediction that even Deity can offer to a 
man. Then he may be sure. Apart from this, his 
life must be lived in uncertainty, mental disturbance, 
doubt, and fear. 



86 GLAD TIDINGS 

One of the great questions which troubles every 
minister to-day is this : How to reanimate the half- 
dead members of the church. A ministry which is 
occupied simply in coddling Christians can never be 
worth much. Professor Drummond, that rare 
spirit, that typical Christian gentleman, was once 
addressing the students of the University of Edin- 
burgh and he pressed upon them this idea, that no 
man liveth to himself. It is impossible. Somebody 
is better or worse because each of us is what he is. 
God has ordered it that we shall live in society and 
make it better or worse. "The man who goes away 
from the world, and shuts himself up and won't 
come out and join you in the best and noblest so- 
cial life of his time is useless, and useless things die. 
The finger is not useless. Cut it off and place it on 
the table, and it is not only useless, but ugly. Take 
away any member from the body and it becomes 
ugly. Apart from Christ, you may say what you 
will, you are ugly and you are useless and you will 
die. A solitary Christian life is an anomaly. In- 
dividual righteousness is impossible. Be out and 
out for Christ. It is far easier. I have the most 
supreme pity for the man who is an amphibian, a 
sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — at church to- 
day, to-morrow with the world. 

We want for the work of the twentieth century 
Christians who are through and through alive. 
When through anyone life tingles in a full-flowing 
stream, there is joy and gladness. What is the nor- 
mal Christian temperament? Listen! Listen! It 
is Christ himself who speaks: "These things have 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 87 

I spoken unto you, that my joy may be in you, and 
that 3^our joy may be made full." That is the 
"Christian temperament." Christianity means, prac- 
tically, vitality. "I came that they may have life, 
and may have it abundantly" — from the center to 
the circumference. We may be church members 
without being members of the body of Christ. "As 
the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide 
in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in 
me." 



THE BIBLE AND HOW IT BECAME WHAT 

IT IS 



From a babe thou hast known the sabered zvritings 
zvhich are able to make thee zvise unto salva- 
tion through faith which is in Christ Jesus. — 
2 Tim. j; 15. 



VII 

THE BIBLE AND HOW IT BECAME WHAT 

IT IS 

In speaking on such a theme as The Bible and 
How it Became What It Is — the secret of its in- 
fluence for generations — you may be quite sure 
that I am put under very perplexing limitations. 
The subject is so large and varied and the time for 
speech is so short, everything must be general. A 
minister must give the results of his thinking and 
investigation, not the processes. He must deal in 
affirmations and convictions. 

If a minister is wise and wants to make the most 
and best of his time he will confine his studies, the 
distilled essence of which his people have in every 
sermon, to men of acknowledged and undisputed 
eminence. In regard to the Old Testament part 
of our Bible, the men who have mastered my mind, 
formed my judgment, and given me my convictions 
are chiefly three — Professors Driver of Oxford 
University, Robertson Smith of Aberdeen Univers- 
ity, and A. B. Davidson of Edinburgh — I mention 
these because if there should be any intelligent 
young man who wants to do good work on Old 
Testament study, these are the men who have given 
their lives to investigations and who know every- 



g2 GLAD TIDINGS 

thing which every other scholar in the world has 
said. To Dr. Davidson, of Edinburgh, I owe a debt 
I can never pay. The student of Davidson's two 
great books, The Prophets of Israel and The 
Theology of the Old Testament, has met a man 
whom all scholars own as a master, in whom the 
most thorough scholarship is combined with the 
sanest judgment and the most beautiful piety. I 
commend him to all intelligent, thoughtful young 
men of character who are troubled with doubts as 
to what the Old Testament is and how it came to be. 

For nowadays everybody assumes that he has 
a right to his opinion on a subject whether he has 
studied it or not. People who are so ignorant of 
their subjects as to reveal their ignorance in the 
very first question they ask or the very first opinion 
they venture, expect to be listened to as if they were 
wise and learned and had knowledge sufficient to 
entitle them to make strong affirmations. It is not 
polite or kind to say to such as these, "My dear sir, 
it does not matter to any single individual in the 
world, except yourself, what your opinion is. You 
are not qualified to give an opinion." Strange, is 
it not, that so many persons think themselves com- 
petent to speak on Bible themes who never once in 
their lives have made any serious study of the Bible 
as a whole? They tell you that they "accepf it, 
or "reject" it, with an easy nonchalance which would 
really be pitiful if it were not so comical. It is 
waste of time to argue with folks of this kind. 

But there are others, people who are somewhat 
perplexed by all this modern talk of "higher 



THE BIBLE 93 

criticism" — all that they know of it being picked 
up from the newspapers and magazines; there are 
young men of open minds — minds not yet fossil- 
ized by indifference and the ardent and exclusive 
pursuit of the material — to whom it may be neces- 
sary to offer the assurance that the higher criti- 
cism, as it is called, has not damaged the Bible. It 
has only humanized it. These three professors, 
whose names I have taken the liberty of quoting — 
Driver, Robertson Smith, Davidson — are all men 
of this order. But they are sane men, conservative 
men, good men, devout Christians. They do not 
belong to the order of rash young German pro- 
fessors who have not yet gone ''to Jericho to get 
their beards grown," men with a passion for being 
original and for saying startling things. 

The higher criticism is concerned only with the 
human element in the Bible. It is concerned with 
the Bible as a piece of literature. How has it come 
to be what it is? How was it built up? Were the 
names which are attached to the several books put 
there subsequently to the writing of the books? 
Such questions — questions of date, of authorship, 
of composition — questions of chronology and of 
arrangement — these and others. Treat the book 
as you would any other book that is ancient, and 
see how it comes out — this has been the demand. 

Well : after all this critical process where do we 
stand ? 

First, as to the Old Testament part of the Bible, 
which does not concern us as do the Christian docu- 
ments. The Old Testament is the Bible of the He- 



94 GLAD TIDINGS 

brews, the Bible of Jesus Christ, the only Bible the 
earliest Christians had as long as the apostles lived. 
That Old Testament is a record of the origin and 
development of a certain people of the Semitic race 
known to us as Hebrews or Jews. Far more than 
we, they are its custodians. That Old Testament, 
as we have it, is a getting together of ancient docu- 
ments, which the Jews held in reverence, revised 
and given their final form by the prophets. 

First of all, we see that God takes one nation and 
through it shows us how all nations are trained. 
Bx uno disce omnes. From one learn all. Every 
one of us must see that it is impossible to put 
within any usable compass the history of all nations. 
This nation was taken because it had certain slum- 
bering capabilities which made it possible to use it 
for God's purposes of instruction and enlightenment 
to all the world. Whenever a bible was put to- 
gether, it was bound to come from the East, be- 
cause Eastern nations are far more religious than 
we are. From the first emergence of that Hebrew 
nation we see it possessed a mysterious ability of 
throwing to the surface just the men God wanted. 

A nation is really great or small according to its 
ability of producing men of great spiritual genius. 
This Hebrew nation was capable of lapsing into 
savagery and doing cruel deeds. The capability of 
spirituality may be accompanied with superstitions 
and untrained outbursts of savage energy which 
need long periods of trial for their subdual. This 
was the case with the old Hebrews. Yet compare 
them with any nation living in their time and their 



THE BIBLE 95 

superiority immediately appears. Alone among all 
the peoples, in them the idea of one God over all the 
earth was developed. Other nations with which 
they were contemporary were polytheistic and idol- 
atrous. Among the Hebrews this same tendency 
had constantly to be arrested by their leading men, 
men endowed with what we know as the prophetic 
instinct, the feeling for spirituality, openness to the 
Spirit of God! 

A second fact we have to recognize : The gradual- 
ness of the revelation God made of himself to them. 
Truths appear when there are people ready to receive 
them. There are those who are not even yet ready 
to receive the Christ — yet has he come because 
many are ready for him. The early books of He- 
brew literature compared with the prophetical books 
of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, are 
crude and elementary. The people were not ready 
for men like the prophets of Israel. Therefore all 
parts of the Bible are not equally inspired. The 
morality of the earlier books is of a much lower 
order than that of the later books. The savagery not 
yet subdued, for instance, in so spiritually-minded 
a man as Samuel the prophet, who '^hewed Agag 
in pieces before the Lord/' is distinctly different 
from the teaching of the book of Jonah which re- 
veals God as sparing the great city Nineveh, when 
it turned to him in sorrow and penitence. The de- 
struction of enemies without mercy and witliout 
pity, as given us in the book of Judges, is emphat- 
ically different from the tone of feeling in the 
prophet Hosea, "For I desire goodness and not sac- 



96 GLAD TIDINGS 

rifice/' Elijah on Carmel, commanding to put to 
death the prophets of Baal, is an illustration of zeal 
without pity. The imprecatory psalms, which are 
strange combinations of prayer to God mingled with 
revenge, are full of perplexity for those of us who 
have had our spiritual life nourished on the Sermon 
on the Mount, with its ''Blessed are the merciful, 
for they shall obtain mercy. . . . Blessed are the 
meek for they shall inherit the earth." 

Such things are unintelligible, so long as we hold 
to the idea that everything done in the Scriptures 
w^as done by divine command. We must not be 
misled by the form of address which we find to have 
prevailed among the people of those far-off centur- 
ies. When we read ''Thus saith the Lord" we shall 
mislead ourselves and others if wt fail to recognize 
that Semitic peoples believed that God did every- 
thing, that he was omnipresent, that he inspired 
hatred against enemies as well as love for friends, 
that he sent evil and good, that he delighted in the 
slaughter of his foes as well as in the worship of 
his friends, and that he inspired his people to exe- 
cute judgment on foreign nations. In order to in- 
terpret these Old Testament narratives correctly we 
must know the people whose history is recorded and 
we must know the times in which they lived. Our 
judgment is controlled by Christian truth — but 
these men were not Christians. No such revela- 
tion had come to them as has come to us. Their 
standards were not ours. 

What then? Is the Old Testament an unsafe 
book to study? Ought we to keep it out of the 



THE BIBLE 97 

hands of the young? Has it had its day? Ought 
it to be no longer read in our churches? If we were 
to take that position we should lose one of the most 
inspiring books the world holds. Because we have 
often misinterpreted it, because our ignorance has 
often led us astray, would it be a common-sense 
proceeding to cast aside a book which more than any 
other ancient book shows us how God's providence 
is continually leading men out of immorality and 
savagery and barbarism into purer spiritual percep- 
tion and nobler spiritual life? The Old Testament 
is the finest book extant to show us how God's spirit 
is ever working in and through men in a continu- 
ally upward movement. Compare it with any book 
in the world (and we can make such comparison 
very much more intelligently and thoroughly than 
ever before in the history of mankind, because we 
know more of the religious books of other peoples 
than our ancestors did) compare it with any book 
in the world and its superiority is beyond question. 
The fact is, we have been hampered by a false 
theory of verbal inspiration. We have had a super- 
stitious reverence for the Bible, which has made 
us feel unsafe unless we had it in our homes — 
often left alone there in its solitary dignity as a kind 
of charm to keep off evil spirits. A blind reverence 
we have had. But, put any Christian congregation 
through an examination on the Old Testament — an 
examination which a Jewish child of thirteen would 
pass with credit — and how should we come out? 
Even those who read it, often read it as a volume of 
dry prose, not perceiving that every form of litera- 



98 GLAD TIDINGS 

ture is in it — history, poetry, legend, myth, alle- 
gory, parable — everything. Sceptics have made 
themselves merry over a serpent speaking to Eve, 
over Balaam's ass talking, over Joshua's sun and 
moon standing still, over Jonah's whale, and these 
parables, allegories as they are, are about all they 
have known of it. Yet many Christian disciples have 
not known what to say to these poor little half- 
lledged sceptics. Our ignorance has often misled us. 
The Bible has not been at fault, our interpretations 
have. We have contended that if the Bible be in- 
spired, it must be infallible. Everything must have 
been copied correctly by the hundreds of transcrib- 
ers in all the ages — which in itself would be a 
miracle of huge proportions. But Jesus himself 
distinctly repudiates the idea of its infallibility 
in these words: "Ye have heard that it was said, 
x\n eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : 
hut I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil." An 
infallible record would require an infallible inter- 
preter. In interpreting the Bible all we need ask for 
is knowledge, common sense, and reverence. 

The result of interpreting it with sufficient knowl- 
edge, common sense, and reverence will be — what ? 
We shall have in our hands the finest book of 
ancient literature the world possesses. In the book 
of Psalms we shall have the finest hymn-book in 
the world. In the book of Proverbs we shall have 
the finest young man's book of secular wisdom in the 
world. In the book of Job we shall have the finest 
drama in the world on the relation of suffering 
to character, "the finest epic of the inner life." In 



THE BIBLE 



99 



the prophecies we shall have the finest illustrations 
of earnest pleadings with self-corrupting nations in 
the world, the finest illustrations of patriotic men 
bent on saving their nation from the madness of 
corporate folly and sin to be found in history, an- 
cient or modern. Is such a book worth preserving? 
(I am speaking now only of the Old Testament.) 
Leaving out of our present view the New Testament 
and taking only the Old, is there in all ancient lit- 
erature anything to compare with it ? Let me quote 
from Professor Driver, who knows it as few men 
know it. "The Old Testament is of permanent 
value,'' he writes, '*on account of the clearness and 
emphasis with which it insists on the primary moral 
duties, obligatory upon man as man, the great do- 
mestic and civic virtues, upon which the happiness of 
the family and the welfare of the community alike 
depend. Truthfulness, honesty, sincerity, justice, 
humanity, philanthropy, generosity, disinterested- 
ness, neighborly regard, sympathy with the unfor- 
tunate or the oppressed, the refusal to injure another 
by word or deed, cleanness of hands, purity of 
thought and action, elevation of motive, singleness 
of purpose — all these are commended and incul- 
cated in the pages of the Old Testament.'' 

The truthfulness and honesty of these records is 
seen in this fact, among others, that everything 
which attests what a stubborn and self-willed people 
God had in training is recorded — their lapses into 
anarchy, as in the book of Judges — the sinful crim- 
inal lapses of their best men, as in Saul and David 
— the weakness of Eli, the treachery of Absalom, 



100 GLAD TIDINGS 

the fall of Solomon through luxury and lust — all 
such lapses are set down. The prophetic historians 
spare nobody. Why? Because they are occupied 
in illustrating the grace of God in the life of the na- 
tion. Biography and history were never so faith- 
fully written. If people wrote our own history so, 
we should cry, Shame on them! as unpatriotic. 
Let the people who complain of the immoralities of 
the Bible records, never forget that we owe a knowl- 
edge of these to the people themselves. Only a 
feeling that such records are sacred, and must not 
be tampered with, could ever have preserved to us 
the condemnatory pages which abound in these his- 
tories. Must they not have been written by men 
who had clear spiritual vision, men who saw that 
all the calamities of nations proceed from moral 
causes and were the consequences of their departure 
from the laws of righteousness which God had given 
them? Have we any historians who could or dare 
write on this principle? If such men existed, no 
publishers would publish their books and no readers 
would buy them. 

Let us then ever bear in mind when we study our 
Bibles that they consist of many cherished docu- 
ments written by divers men in divers manners — 
by historians, poets, and allegorists — that they were 
ultimately revised by the prophets of Israel from 
whom in their present form we get them, that they 
were never intended to teach science — neither as- 
tronomy nor geology nor biology nor any other 
ology; nor were they primarily intended as history. 
They were intended to show how God had brought 



THE BIBLE loi 

into existence this remarkable people, what a per- 
verse and wilful people they were, how he redeemed 
them from bondage, trained them, revealed him- 
self to them ; how they suffered for their follies and 
sins; how the nation was destroyed by its own 
iniquities ; how those most remarkable men who ever 
lived, the prophets, struggled to bring them to a 
better mind; how the people hated and stoned and 
murdered their best friends. And through these ex- 
amples let us learn how God is leading and training 
and chastising every people and nation, that the 
same follies and sins in our American life will bring 
the same kind of punishment; how God speaks to 
every nation through its best men, how he cannot 
speak through any others. "The Lord Jehovah," 
says Amos, "will do nothing, but he revealeth his 
secret unto his servants the prophets." Thus may 
these great literatures be of permanent value to us. 
What is the secret of the world-wide influence 
of these books? Why in every year is the Bible 
the best selling book in the book market? Why 
has it been translated into more languages than 
any other book? Why do bad men hate it and 
good men love it? There is but one sufficient an- 
swer. It lives because God's spirit speaks in it and 
through it. It lives because of its inherent superi- 
ority to every other record of religious experience 
which has ever appeared. It lives because it knows 
more about man in all the twistings and windings 
of his complex nature than any other book. It 
knows human nature to its deepest depths as even 
Shakespeare never knew it. If it contained noth- 



102 GLAD TIDINGS 

ing else than that completest of all devotional books, 
the book of Psalms, it would be a pearl of great 
price, a treasure of priceless value. The voice of 
contrition, the voice of penitence, the voice of resig- 
nation and trust, the voice of yearning for God's 
presence and the spiritual privilege of communion 
with him, the voice of reverential joy and jubilation, 
the voice of thanksgiving and exaltation — these 
and other voices are all heard there. All the prob- 
lems of human life, all the pathos of human sor- 
row : "all these varied notes are uttered with a depths 
an intensity, a purity, which stand unparalleled in 
religious literature and which the poets and hymn 
writers of subsequent ages have been content to look 
up to as an unapproachable model." 

Permit me to close these reflections with a very 
eloquent extract from a man who once occupied a 
very conspicuous place before the people of Boston 
and New England : 

''This collection of books has taken such a hold 
on the world as no other. The literature of Greece, 
which goes up like incense from that land of tem- 
ples and heroic deeds, has not half the influence of 
this book, from a nation alike despised in ancient and 
in modern times. It is read of a Sabbath in all of the 
ten thousand pulpits of our land. In all the tem- 
ples of religion is its voice lifted up week by week. 
The sun never sets on its glowing page. It goes 
equally to the cottage of the plain man and the palace 
of the king. It is woven into the literature of the 
scholar, and colors the talk of the street. The bark 
of the merchant cannot sail the sea without it; no 



THE BIBLE 103 

ships of war go to the conflict but the Bible is there. 
It enters men's closets; mingles in all their grief and 
cheerfulness of life. The affianced maiden prays 
God in Scripture for strength in her new duties. 
Men are married by Scripture. The Bible attends 
them in their sickness, when the fever of the world 
is on them. The aching head finds a softer pillow 
when the Bible lies underneath. It blesses us when 
we are born ; gives names to half Christendom ; re- 
joices with us; has sympathy for our mourning. 
Under its influence the timid man does not fear to 
take the death angel by the hand and bid farewell 
to wife and babes at home. Men rest on it their 
dearest hopes ; it tells them of God and of his blessed 
Son; of earthly duties and heavenly rest.'' 

From whom am I quoting this eloquent language? 
Whose is this fervid speech? Whose heart throb is 
it I feel beating so fervently in this splendid eulogy 
of the Book of Books ? It is the arch-heretic of New 
England, Theodore Parker. And now, does any 
one ask the question — Is the Bible inspired ? Such 
a question is the question of a child — of a mere 
babe. 

But what of it? What matters all this splendid 
rhetoric to any one of us unless he can say truthfully 
for himself, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and 
light unto my path." 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE 



/ keep under my body, and bring it into subjection. 
— I Cor. 9: 2y. 



VIII 
THE FIGHT OF LIFE 

The Revised Version has it: "I bufifet my body, 
and bring it into bondage." It seems an extraordin- 
ary thing that man's own nature should not be har- 
monious, that it should be a battle-ground. And 
yet of the fact there can be no doubt. We soon dis- 
cover that we have bodily appetites and passions and 
that unless they are disciplined the whole mind and 
spirit will be under their control. 

When a child begins to develop self-consciousness, 
he has not sufficient understanding of his own na- 
ture to be allowed to have his own way. Not only 
will he eat too much and drink too much; but he 
will eat and drink of that which will gratify his 
palate rather than of plain, solid, nutritious food. 
Instead of going to school, if allowed to have his 
own way, he will very much prefer to play in the 
streets. Instead of going to Sunday-school or 
church he will prefer something else. Hence we 
see the necessity for a wise and understanding par- 
enthood. 

The evolutionists have much to say of the pro- 
longation of infancy in the young of the human fam- 
ily, far beyond the time of the most intelligent brute. 



io8 GLAD TIDINGS 

Infancy furnishes the field for the exercise of all 
the virtues of parenthood. It is in infancy that tares 
are sown along with the wheat. Psychologists are 
well agreed that character seldom changes radically 
in its quality and direction after twenty years of 
age. If that be so, we know into what years of 
life the utmost of care and labor ought to be put. 
God never gives to men and women work that is 
of rank or importance at all to be compared with 
the nourishing and training and schooling of young 
immortals. Estimated in the light of immortality 
no intelligent and sane mind can possibly fail to see 
that there is no duty or work or privilege at all com- 
parable to that of taking the plastic material of in- 
fancy and stamping it with piety and virtue — piety 
towards God and virtue towards man. And what- 
ever help pastors or Sunday-school teachers are ren- 
dering parents in this, the most important work in 
the world, though oftentimes (shame to those of 
whom it is true!) it is scarcely recognized, will 
surely be rewarded by him who said "Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven.'' 

The discipline of the body — the fight of which 
the apostle speaks — must begin as soon as self- 
consciousness appears. Wilfulness must be changed 
into willingness, or the life of the child will be an- 
archic and therefore miserable. It does not know 
itself. It has to be taught. Law and grace must co- 
operate in this most important of all things. Every 
close student of human nature recognizes the neces- 
sity of this conjunction and sees signs of it, or signs 
of the want of it, in the households he frequents. I 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE 109 

have three very intimate ministerial friends into 
whose homes it has been my privilege to be very 
frequently welcomed. There are thirteen children in 
the three homes. I need not ask whether law and 
grace have cooperated in the nurture of those chil- 
dren. They are all of adult age now and there is 
not among them one for whom father and mother 
cannot devoutly thank God. 

This, however, must never be lost sight of, that 
before a man can control the young — even his own 
children — he has to acquire self-control. This is 
Paul's idea. "If," he says virtually, ''I am to in- 
fluence other men, I must subdue myself.'' And this 
is true of every one of us. The great fight of life 
is not with that which is external to us, but with 
that which is of our own self-hood. There is a di- 
vine order for human life. That which is superior 
has to control that which is inferior. Mind has to 
control body. 

A man is, as it were, a little society in himself. 
In that little society which each man is, there may 
be order or there may be anarchy. If the mind rules 
the body and if the spiritual part rules both mind 
and body, there is order. But if the body, with its 
animal passions, rules the mind and spirit, there is 
anarchy as really as when the lowest classes in a 
nation — by which I mean the vicious classes — are 
ruling the virtuous and intelligent classes. A man 
whose bodily passions are ruling him, really belongs 
to the vicious classes. He may be socially respecta- 
ble, all the greater shame that he should not be mor- 
ally respectable. For, as Dr. Marcus Dods puts it : 



no GLAD TIDINGS 

"The proper function of the body is to serve the 
will, to bring the inner man into contact with the 
outer world and enable him to influence it. When 
the body mutinies and refuses to obey the will, 
when it usurps authority and compels the man to 
do its bidding, it becomes his most dangerous 
enemy/' And so it is legitimate to say that a man's 
first and most momentous battle is with himself. If 
he can win in that battle, he can win in battles ex- 
ternal to himself. At any rate he will have a 
strength to fight which he could never have so long 
as he carried about with him from day to day, in 
his own personality, his greatest enemy. 

Let us not, however, suppose that bodily appe- 
tencies are necessarily vicious. We are really slaves 
to the body when we are so fond of comforts and 
indulgences that we cannot do without them. 
These weaken the will and make duties irksome, till 
eventually persistent yielding to these comforts and 
indulgences makes us, practically, of very little use 
for those services which we might othenvise so 
readily perform. The question whether those of us 
who are Christian disciples have really fought the 
fight which even an apostle (who seems to have 
been very conscious of body) had to fight is a very 
much more serious question than perhaps any of 
us recognize. In past ages men have tried to sub- 
due the body by fastings, by scourgings, by doing 
unpleasant things simply because they were un- 
pleasant. And we are inclined to speak scornfully 
of these austerities. Would it not be better to ask 
ourselves whether we have so used our bodies as 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE iii 

to make them servants of the mind and spirit? Be- 
cause, clearly, it is out of all reason to assume that 
the Creator should make men and dower them with 
emotion, with intelligence, with will, with imagina- 
tion, with conscience, in order that all these great 
and glorious faculties may be in servitude to the de- 
mands of the body. Action and reaction is the law 
of the universe and the body and spirit act and re- 
act upon one another. That is the law of progress. 
So that the body is not necessarily an enemy. Much 
otherwise. It is a friend, a very helpful friend, so 
long as it is kept where it belongs. 

Let us have no foolish fanaticism about sinfulness 
inhering in the body, or the body being nothing 
we need care for. For, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it : 
"Speech of this sort is the weakness and delusion 
of the people who call themselves Christian Sci- 
entists, who have hold on a half-truth ; but they hold 
it in so narrow and bigoted a fashion that, in self- 
defence, they think it safest strenuously to deny the 
existence of all other sides. In this fertile enter- 
prise they are of the same mental class as the ma- 
terialists, who, on the other side, deny all except that 
which the eyes can see and the fingers touch." 

This body of ours is God's gift and the more we 
know it, as his gift, the most wondrous of his gifts 
to us, the more we glorify him. Know ye not that 
your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit ? More dig- 
nifying language cannot be used. But I would urge 
that we ask ourselves such questions as these : ''Can 
we honestly say that our body is brought into sub- 
jection; that it dare not curtail our devotions on 



112 GLAD TIDINGS 

the plea of weariness ; that it dare not demand a dis- 
pensation from duty on the plea of some sHght bod- 
ily disturbance ; that it never persuades us to neglect 
any duty on the score of its unpleasantness to the 
flesh; that it never prompts us to undue anxiety 
either about what we shall eat or drink, or where- 
withal we shall be clothed ; that it never quite treads 
the spirit under foot and defiles it with wicked im- 
aginings?" 

In these days when Spartan simplicity of life is 
almost unknown except among country ministers, 
home missionaries, and the virtuous poor, we need 
to ask ourselves, and that very seriously: "Is our 
mental, our spiritual nature, ruling us; or is it 
arrested in its development because in all things we 
must be in the fashion of the hour?" That really 
is a very serious question. Very, very seldom do 
Christian disciples lie (not right out at any rate) nor 
steal, nor commit adultery, nor do any of the coarse 
and vulgar things which are ordinarily condemned 
as vicious. But do we keep the mental uppermost? 
Do we so feed the spiritual part of our nature, our 
conscience, our reason, our imagination, our affec- 
tions, as to make them robust enough to be domi- 
nant? Because this is the only way to bring the 
body into subjection. Mere asceticism will not do 
it. Negations never can make a meal. Positively, 
by strengthening and cultivating into vigor and su- 
premacy everything which is not body — that is the 
only way whereby the body is made to keep its place. 

You know how, if you pamper anybody whom 
you have in service, who has a servile mind (please 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE 113 

observe that qualifying clause), you spoil them. 
And, by and by, a separation has to come. There 
is nothing we own that tyrannizes over us and en- 
slaves us as does a pampered body. It is always 
persuading us that it is ill and that its health has 
continually to be looked after and, if it belongs to 
a rich enough person, it has to be conveyed to some 
other climate for fear of catching cold. With some 
people taking care of the body has become a species 
of idolatry. The mind rebels and the spirit rebels, 
but, poor things, like dogs, they are told to get into 
their kennels and stop howling. 

And these physical heresies descend from parents 
to children, so that on a moist Sunday, when God 
is fertilizing the earth with the rains for which 
farmers and mill-owners have been praying, even 
the boys are kept at home from Sunday-school. If 
I were a boy, I hope I would resent being treated 
as if I were salt or sugar and might liquefy and run 
down the drain between home and school. 

I believe St. Paul hated an unmanly man or boy. 
"Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus 
Christ." '*Be strong, and quit yourselves like 
men," he said, and I am sure St. John did, 
for when he wrote to the churches he knew 
and loved, he addressed the young men in 
this way: "I have written unto you, young men, 
because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth 
in you." You will observe how this all-alive man, 
Paul, does not disdain to take his illustrations from 
the athletic games of his time. The Isthmian games, 
one of the most ancient glories of Corinth, fur- 



114 GLAD TIDINGS 

nished the apostle with the readiest illustration of 
his theme. They occupied the place our football 
contests have. Only they were not so brutal. They 
furnished no opportunity for slugging. Only 
Greeks of pure blood and of high character could 
engage in them. The reward was not the gate- 
money of twenty thousand spectators. Nothing so 
vulgar. It was a pine wreath on the brow, a tri- 
umphal procession, a statue in the market-place. St. 
Paul calls it a corruptible crown and contrasts it 
with the incorruptible for which he was fighting. 

And then he gives this advice : In order to the 
obtaining of one crown or the other three elements 
in character have to be cultivated — self-control, de- 
cision, earnestness. Self-control : ''Every man that 
striveth in the games is temperate [/. e., exerciseth 
self-control] in all things." Decision : "I there- 
fore so run, as not uncertainly,'' not as a man 
who does not know where he is going or has 
not fully made up his mind to go there. Earnest- 
ness : "So fight I, as not beating the air'' — not as 
one who amuses himself ; but as one w^ho has a real 
business on hand. Self-control — decision — earn- 
estness, the fight each of us must have with self de- 
mands these. 

But how to get them? It is not difficult to learn 
the will of God ; to do it, that is the difficulty. Op- 
posed to self-control is self-indulgence and we are 
all tempted to it. Did I not believe that every man 
aiming and trying to do the highest and best is 
helped by the Spirit of God in the doing of it, I 
should have no heart to preach. But do we not re- 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE 115 

member that the fruit of the Spirit is not only love, 
joy, peace, long-suffering, but also self-control. In 
the old version the word is temperance; but in the 
new — in Galatians 5:23 — and that rightly, self- 
control. At the end of a very able and excellent 
book. Rational Living, President King of Oberlin 
College sums up the one all-inclusive principle of 
Christ's practical teaching (life through self-sacri- 
fice — saving the life by loving it — love) in this 
way, which I think will make it very much easier 
for some: ^'Clearly," he says, "this means three 
things: habitual self-control; devotion to the work 
given us to do, facing exactly our situation, and giv- 
ing ourselves in our personal relations to others/' 

Self — work — society. The fight with self in- 
volves the subjection of the lower to the higher in 
our own nature. Out of this will come the 
doing what we have to do in the world in 
the way of work, not slavishly, but as if we were 
partners in the firm and our association with others 
will be of the nature of genuine friendliness and 
good will. 

Now, all this, to the man who thinks that he is 
alone, not the recipient of spiritual help from un- 
seen sources, will seem hard and impossible. But 
when a man realizes that all good doing, all upward 
striving has the Infinite at the back of it, the situa- 
tion is changed. Boston Harbor might say, *'I shall 
never fill myself with water so that big ships can 
float over me;" and it could not, if at the back of it 
there was not the Atlantic ocean. So when this 
energetic and intellectual apostle says: '1 beseech 



ii6 GLAD TIDINGS 

you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to 
present your bodies a Hving sacrifice, holy, accept- 
able to God" — he could add, ^'which is your reason- 
able service," because he knew, from his own ex- 
perience, that no man went at warfare at his own 
charges; that every right-willing and right-doing 
man was a God-helped man. 

I don't think I am wrong when I say that we 
suffer degeneration in our spiritual life more from 
bodily self-indulgence than from any other source. 
We do not keep under our body and bring it into 
subjection. We do not make it the servant of mind 
and spirit. The other day a distinguished Amherst 
professor was lecturing to teachers in Boston, and 
referring to young people of high-school age re- 
marked: "The danger of overpressure from study 
is probably not so great as in the lower grades. 
The greatest danger is of too much and too intense 
social life, and the accompanying excitement, late 
hours, and loss of sleep." In other words, want of 
intelligent self-control. 

St. Paul lived in the midst of a people where the 
cultivation of symmetry of body, pose of figure, 
graceful movement, was a passion. No people ever 
so succeeded in combining strength and beauty of 
figure as did the Greeks. As he looked upon these 
bewitching forms his language took shape. It be- 
came spiritually athletic. '*I keep under my body, 
and bring it into subjection." And as he gazed on 
the marble temples: *'Know ye not that your body 
is a temple of the Holy Spirit?" And so he says 
to us in effect: You cannot sin against the body. 



THE FIGHT OF LIFE 117 

without sinning against the mind and spirit. You 
cannot over-indulge the body and Hsten to its un- 
ceasing demands, without the mental and affectional 
becoming weakened and enslaved. The glory of 
a man is not in his body. It is in his intellect, his 
will, in that mysterious spiritual nature which en- 
nobles him and makes him the aristocrat of the 
world. But in order to get uprightness he has to 
fight. The battle-ground is his own nature. 

Uprightness — what does it mean ? Physically, 
it means that a man is not crawling on all fours, with 
his head to the ground, like a bear or a hog. His 
head is uppermost and his feet undermost. Intel- 
lectually, it means that mind is ruling body. Spirit- 
ually (or morally, whichever word you prefer) it 
means that spirit is ruling both intellect and body. 
Nothing short of that is uprightness. Though none 
of you believe it, yet it is true, that religion is the real 
business of life, because it means the attaining to up- 
rightness. And uprightness means the highest in 
man dominating the lowest. Sin means the lowest 
dominating the highest. So that sin may be the 
most fashionable thing in society and people never 
realize it; for it may be so much care for the body 
and its demands that the spirit and its demands are 
put in servitude to the body. That is sin, however 
well dressed it may be, however socially respectable, 
however flattered and feted and dined and wined 
and toasted. Whenever the body is on top and the 
spirit in servitude to the body, there is loss of 
integrity, loss of uprightness. 

This is the fight of all fights, the fight with self. 



ii8 GLAD TIDINGS 

No man can escape it. It is the only way to any 
kind of robustness and strength. Softness of life, 
yieldingness, avoiding whatever is hard or disagree- 
able or unpleasant, is certain failure. ''To him that 
overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, 
which is in the midst of the paradise of God." 
Nothing in the world worth anything but involves 
a hard fight. Let us try to learn afresh the mean- 
ing of that apostolic experience given to us in the 
words: *1 keep under my body, and bring it into 
subjection: lest that by any means, when I have 
preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.'* 



LIFE'S CHOICES 



Choosing rather to be evil entreated zi'ith the people 
of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for 
a season, — Heb. ii: 2j. 



IX 

LIFE'S CHOICES 

I wanted to speak to young men and young 
women this first Lord's Day evening of the 
year, while the year itself is still young. It 
has only three hundred and sixty-five days to live, 
and it has lived already the odd five. The year is 
young and life with many of you is still young life. 
You have not had very much experience — enough 
perhaps to have already a little bundle of 
disappointments stored away in the cabinet of mem- 
ory. But the forward look is more to you than the 
backward look. Anticipation is more than reflec- 
tion. 

The question comes up to us pastors, again and 
again. How can we help our young people? How 
can we be of service to them? How can we make 
life more to them and not less? How can we stimu- 
late them to be that which each is capable of being ? 
These are the questions which form themselves in 
our minds very often. 

How to answer them is difficult. The same an- 
swer will scarcely do for all cases, or for many cases. 
Some young folks are naturally aspiring, naturally 
good and noble, naturally amiable; others are natur- 



122 GLAD TIDINGS 

ally the exact opposite of all these. The medicine 
which would cure the one, will kill the other. Hence 
words addressed to all at the same time will scarcely 
be applicable to all. And yet there is great value 
in public address. While it is drawing the bow at 
a venture the arrow is certain to hit someone. I 
believe it is generally true that ministers who are 
worth anything at all never speak so truly, so really 
what they think in their heart of hearts, as when in 
their pulpits. The sense of responsibility is keener 
there than it is elsewhere. I hope, therefore, that no 
young man or young woman will be inclined to say 
sarcastically: ''Well, it is only a sermon!" and so 
go away and toss off what is suggested. 

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, ii : 25, is this sen- 
tence, ''Choosing rather to be evil entreated with 
the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of 
sin for a season." These words were written by 
one great man about another. They refer to the 
choice Moses made. He had the chance to live a 
luxurious life in an Egy^ptian palace and Egypt then 
was one of the foremost civilizations of the world; 
but he refused to live that life and threw in his lot 
with his own beggared and enslaved people. 

With the light that Moses had in his mind, it 
w^ould have been a sin to him to do othenvise. All 
that was best in him would have to be crucified and 
all that was worst would have gone to the front. 
Moses, as we now know him, would never have been 
heard of. He made his choice and all his life de- 
pended on it. What did he choose? He chose to 
be true to his best self, true to his people, true to 



LIFE'S CHOICES 123 

what his mother had taught him about God's prom- 
ises for that nation to which he belonged. I want 
to speak about our choices in Hfe and what depends 
on them. 

First of all, let me say that there is a great differ- 
ence between desiring something and choosing it. 
Desire is weak and indolent. It does not develop 
into action. Choice implies action. It implies at- 
tachment to something and separation from some- 
thing. It implies taking something and leaving 
something else alone. 

The first thing about which young men and 
young women have to make a choice is their com- 
panionships. If I were to say that all people are 
alike, no one here would believe me. There are 
people naturally truthful and people who easily lie. 
There are people naturally pure in feeling and other 
people foul in feeling. There are people who are 
predominantly amiable and other people who 
are predominantly irascible. There are people 
who are temperamentally generous and others tem- 
peramentally mean. All the world knows this. It is 
no discovery of mine, a very common fact — yet the 
common facts of life are the most important from 
their very commonness. Our life will be this or 
that, not according to what we faintly desire, but 
what we resolutely choose. 

No wise man with any experience of life, would 
ever say to young men and young women : '*You 
need not be careful about your companionships. 
Take any companion who offers himself — or her- 
self." No advice could be worse. Young men and 



124 GLAD TIDINGS 

young women are not strong enough to do this. 
Strength comes from activity. The arm used to 
overcome resistance grows muscle. The man who 
walks several miles daily is the only man who can 
walk easily and enjoy it. Young men and young 
women are very susceptible. They are easily 
impressed. Youth is the time of impression. 
The memory retains more easily than later on. 
I have personally forgotten many recent things, 
but words I heard when a boy at school re- 
main. And that which the young hear in youth 
will stick. The impressions made then are not 
easily obliterated. When you come upon young 
men who are profane in their speech, who do not 
feel the vulgarity of profanity, have nothing further 
to do with them. When you meet with young men 
who are manifestly impure in feeling — immodest, 
salacious — who have no reverence for the purity of 
w^omanhood, drop them as you would shake off a 
viper. The viper is to be preferred to these. When 
you meet with a crafty, deceitful youth with a 
Mephistopheles tendency in him, remember that that 
young man will betray you if he has a chance and 
it suits him to do it. He is entirely unreliable and 
altogether unworthy of your confidence. When you 
meet with a youth mean in his feelings and senti- 
ments, captious, carping, critical, always saying 
some evil thing of others, you incur a bigger risk 
than you know if you tie up to him. When you 
meet with young men who have no reverence for 
that which is sacred, no reverence for religion, no 
reverence for that which is superior intellectually, 



I 



LIFE'S CHOICES 125 

no reverence for age, no particular esteem for father 
or tender love for mother, be sure that there is an 
inward grossness of soul. These are types of char- 
acter with which you cannot afford to associate. 
Only evil can come to you from such associations. 

And there is no necessity for companying with 
these types of character. There are other types. 
There are young men who are too refined to be pro- 
fane. There are young men who have descended 
from a pure ancestry in whose veins there is love 
without lust, who have a natural reverence for the 
grace and purity and modesty of womanhood. 
There are young men who are open-faced, open- 
minded, true-hearted, without any craft or deceit, 
on whom you can rely, young men of high principle 
and good habits. Nor need you have anything to 
do with mean natures — small, petty, crafty, fault- 
finding natures — for there are others of an exactly 
opposite kind to be had. Moreover, why tie up to 
those who have no reverence for that which is sa- 
cred — a sign generally that they have no rever- 
ence, indeed, for anything, no eye for that which 
is superior — when young men are to be found of a 
very much nobler type, and of a more bountiful 
manhood. 

Be careful in choosing your companions. It is 
old advice but it is always new. Every new genera- 
tion needs it. The man who should eat diseased 
meat, when he can get good meat; the man who 
should drink foul water, when he can sip the crystal 
spring; the man who should live in a sewer, when 
he can live in the open air of heaven, would be 



126 GLAD TIDINGS 

counted either imbecile or insane. But what is the 
difference between these and those who prefer the 
filthy, the low, the impure, the profane, to the pure, 
the noble, and those whose souls are endowed with 
reverence? The whole of life will be colored by 
its earliest companionships. 

And that which is true about living men and 
women, living boys and girls, is true about books. 
You have to reject some, as well as to choose others. 
In these days of freedom, in this country where the 
idea of freedom is supreme over every other idea, 
the duty of wise choice is imperative if we are to 
live lives that shall be honorable. No one who had 
the ordinary gift of reason would say that young 
men and women should be turned loose into the 
broad pasture of literature and left to their instincts 
as are wild animals on the prairies. In some things 
the animals are our superiors. But in the sum-total 
of endowment we are very much superior to any 
of them. 

The higher the nature the more of choice is left 
in it. 

If every nature were a thoroughly healthy nature 

— no sinful tendency in any of us, no low propensity 

— there would be immediate aversion when we 
came upon any form of corruption. The powers 
of smell and taste are so keenly developed in animals 
that instinctively they avoid most noxious grasses 
and herbs. But young men and women have often 
inherited terribly strong biases and propensities to 
evil. From the very first they are too strong, 
stronger than anything else in the nature. Would 



LIFE'S CHOICES 127 

any reasonable being say that along that already too 
strong line the nature ought to be cultivated? 

Your boy has a propensity to self-indulgence of 
the appetite to drink strong drinks? Does that in- 
dicate that Providence intends you to set him up in 
the liquor business? Or, you can see from the first 
that he will be strongly tempted to impurity and 
sensualism ? Does that indicate that he is to be en- 
couraged to seek the society of the weak and 
frivolous among women ? Or, you see from the first 
that he is grasping, avaricious, hates to give away 
a cent, has a beaver-propensity to hoard, a Shylock 
determination to have what he calls his own. 
Would any wise mother or father feed that tendency 
and encourage it? If so, that father or mother is 
responsible if some day their son has permanent 
quarters in the state's prison. 

To' the third and fourth generation evil tenden- 
cies propagate themselves. There is in Schenectady 
a family which has become notorious because for 
several generations almost every child has been a 
thief or worse. There are some hundred of them 
now. Formerly there was only a single family. I 
know of a nobleman's family in England in which in 
the present earl there is an unconquerable tendency 
to steal. Being a wealthy nobleman it is called 
kleptomania and treated as a disease. In a laborer 
on his estate it would be called stealing. How came 
that propensity there? It has come, in direct de- 
scent, from the days when an ancestor of his used 
to fight in border warfare and take the cattle and 
goods of the conquered. 



I 



128 GLAD TIDINGS 

In every one of us there is some wrong pro- 
pensity; the apostle calls it ''the sin which doth so 
easily beset us/' Every one has to watch himself at 
that point. If he conquers there he will conquer 
everywhere. To indulge that propensity, to go where 
it will be gratified, to read books which ought never 
to be allowed publication, books written by foul and 
filthy fornicators and adulterers, is — shall I say 
unwise? That would be no word to use in such a 
connection. Shall I say iinadvisable? — or impru- 
dent? Such words are mockery in such a case. To 
cultivate thus these tendencies is to choose to com- 
pany with lepers and the unclean. 

Knowing what I know of the terrible pull which 
evil has upon a nature started in its direction, I offer 
no apology for using the strongest language which 
is allowable in this place and at this time. Is it not 
amazing, that dilly-dallying with evil which covers 
up from itself its own shame by saying proverbially 
and leniently that it is to be expected that young 
men will sow their wild oats, that allowance is to 
be made, that maturity will bring wisdom, and so 
on ! Such speech indicates in the speaker an inward 
defect of moral sense which is pitiable. If there 
be any man for whom every upright man ought to 
feel righteous anger and every pure woman un- 
mitigated contempt amounting to loathing, it is the 
man who writes and the man who sells filthy and 
obscene literature to the young. If the moral sense 
of the community were not in a state of semi- 
paralysis, such creatures would be hunted out of so- 
ciety as relentlessly as the farmer hunts out of his 



LIFE'S CHOICES 129 

barns rats or skunks. Yes, more so ! for these crea- 
tures keep on the level of their natures, but such 
men deliberately abandon themselves to a course 
which is so unmanly that it seems like the uttering 
a falsehood to apply so respectable a word as that 
of man to bipeds so unworthy of it. 

Just think of it! Here is a fine young boy, 
a fair young girl, child of virtuous Christian 
parentage. Over boy and girl many a prayer 
has been offered. Love has been poured out, care 
expended, the tenderest regard has been constant. 
Sunday-school teachers have aided parents. Pas- 
tors have thrown in their influence. All this is to 
direct aright that young, pure life. The boy or 
girl is sent to school. Under cover of some inno- 
cent-looking, lying wrapper, there goes through the 
post into this school some foul and salacious 
pamphlet. A poison is distilled into the blood 
of this young life which may leave moral malaria 
there for years. I say if there is anything which 
shows the utter hypocrisy of much which calls it- 
self charity and love of freedom in our civilization, 
it is this inability to rouse burning indignation 
against such hideous monsters of iniquity. 

It may not be necessary to say it to some of you 
— perhaps not to any — but one never knows. Yet, 
my young friends, be more careful about your com- 
panions and about your books than about your food. 
As the German poet puts it : '*Your choice is brief, 
but yet endless." Brief — it takes but an hour, 
sometimes only a moment, to make a choice. But 
the consequences are endless. Everyone has to live 



130 GLAD TIDINGS 

on a principle of selection. If you are to have some 
things you can only have them by rejecting others. 
You cannot have both virtue and vice. One or the 
other has to be rejected. Many persons desire to be 
educated and cultivated; but they will not give the 
self-denial necessary. They want bodily ease and 
self-indulgence and the gay throng, and they cannot 
have both. And so the choice is about like this: 
"Give me present pleasure; give me good prospects 
in this world; give me something to eat and drink 
and wear; give me a place where I shall be praised 
and shall be honored and I will let intelligence go. 
I will pick up what little information I need as I 
go along." So is it everywhere. In order to get 
the best, the worst, however fair it look, however 
smiling, however tempting, has to be rejected. 

I think of these large cities of modern times and 
of the young men and young women who come up 
to them. If many of them were wise they would 
not come. There is no sweeter, purer, more honest, 
more satisfactory life than on the old farm, where 
people are never rich, but never poor. But they 
come — come from pure homes, come to get rich 
(as they say to the old neighbors) and make a for- 
tune. But they soon are drawn away. The world, 
the flesh, and the devil are too much for many of 
them. Oh, what great slaughter-houses many of 
these cities are! Oh, the destructions that go on! 
Oh, the annual waste of the best blood! Why, if 
men should be carried on purpose, by the hand of 
the tyrant, to such shambles of execution as they 
go to of their own accord, if young men were to 



LIFE'S CHOICES 131 

be put upon such racks as I see them voluntarily 
bring themselves to, it would be thought to be a 
most monstrous and outrageous thing. 

What is the weak point in many of these young 
men and women? Is it not weakness of will, want 
oi the power resolutely to choose a right course and 
keep in it without turning to the right hand or to the 
left? Only God can give the will-power and many 
of them are ungodly. And they do not see that un- 
godliness means unmanliness and unwomanliness. 

Any fool can desire — it takes a man to choose. 
If we could only get young men to see in what true 
manliness consisted, young women to see in what 
true womanliness consisted, it would be an inestim- 
able blessing to not a few. 

Suppose they fling the word Samt! at you, if 
you follow not their course^ as a man shies a stone 
at a dog. Well, what of it? A pretty poor speci- 
men you are if you cannot brave a little of that kind 
of mild abuse. 

Choose that which you would like to be in your 
best hours! Choose that which you would have 
your best friends believe you to be! Choose that 
which will appear the best when you die! 



LONG SIGHT 



While zve look not at the things which are seen, but 
at the things which are not seen: for the things 
which are seen are temporal; but the things 
zvhich are not seen are eternal — 2 Cor. 4: 18. 



X ' 

LONG SIGHT 

Clearly in the apostle's judgment, one of the great 
uses of Christian truth is to give a man long sight. 

This noble man had had all the benefits his age 
could give him in the way of mental training; but 
that mental training had not elongated his power 
of vision sufficiently to keep him from being a most 
diabolical persecutor of his fellow men. He was not 
for that time a bad man, but a blind man. Any- 
way, he was a man who could only see a very 
little way ahead. The experiences he passed 
through afterwards elongated his vision. He saw 
farther. He carried an invisible telescope through 
which he took in worlds which had made no im- 
pression on him aforetime. From which we may 
make certain very useful inferences, such as these — 
that seeing-power is various: that it needs culti- 
vation: that the experiences of life, especially those 
that probe us to the quick, are necessary to that long- 
sightedness of which the apostle gives us an illus- 
tration in his own person : and, lastly, that only the 
man who has spiritual discernment has anything ap- 
proaching to fulness of vision. 

How various seeing-power is we all know. Our 
ordinary bodily eyesight is far from uniform. At 



136 GLAD TIDINGS 

dififerent periods of life we have different seeing- 
powers. The oculist discovers that eyes vary almost 
as much as faces. In the same person the two eyes 
may not be twins. One may be long-sighted and 
the other short-sighted. In the days behind us, 
^'glasses/' as the word was, invariably meant "age 
stealing on.'' In our day we meet with mere babies 
spectacled as if they had been born fifty years old. 
It is only within a very brief period of time that 
people have known how defective we are in that 
kind of vision we call physical. Mentally it is the 
same. 

Really all vision is mental, even that we call phys- 
ical. For we never see a thing until we mentally 
recognize that we see it. The differences in mental 
vision are so various that it would almost seem as 
if there were minds of different kinds, as there are 
herbs of various kinds and fishes of various kinds 
and birds of various kinds and animals of various 
kinds. Take the one illustration of the inability of 
men to see alike on any subject you may introduce. 
One man sees it from one angle of vision, another 
from another. There may be a certain measure of 
agreement, some common ground on which men 
may stand, but the outlook from that ground will 
be different for any two men. 

Allow me to give an illustration of the difference 
out of my own experience — showing that eleva- 
tion had everything to do with outlook. Looking 
upon the river Rhine from Bingen, on its bank, 
level with the water, it was disappointing. Op- 
posite Bingen, on the other side of the river, is a 



LONG SIGHT 137 

national monument. Why it should be put on that 
particular spot did not appear. But we must see 
the monument and examine it. On reaching it, we 
soon discovered how its elevation and distance had 
diminished it. But that was not all. We discov- 
ered why that spot was chosen for a national 
monument. The Rhine itself was revealed to us in 
all the sweep of its beauty. Miles and miles of it 
stretched away from our feet, the most lovable and 
living thing in that landscape. Then we felt the 
throb of energy in the lines on the monument : 

''Dear Fatherland, no fears be thine, 
Firm stand thy sons to guard the Rhine." 

The difference in elevation had brought the differ- 
ence in revelation. Since then I have been accus- 
tomed to ask myself the question when considering 
a subject: Are you looking at it from the low levels 
of Bingen or from the heights of the Niederwald? 
And when I hear men talking on the subjects which 
divide us, I ask myself : Where is this man stand- 
ing? On the low level so that he cannot see far, 
or on the heights from which he gets largeness and 
comprehensiveness of view? Mental seeing-power 
is even more varied than physical seeing-power. 

One step further — this seeing-power needs cul- 
tivation. Always we must bear in mind that God 
never gives us finished-up faculty, that everything 
is a seed to be sown, a germ to be fructified, cared 
for, and developed. A man with no seeing-power 
beyond that of the average man you meet on tlie 
street stands before some work of art like Raphael's 



138 GLAD TIDINGS 

Dresden Madonna. He looks at it for a little while 
and then remarks : ''It's very pretty, but I don't see 
why they make such a fuss over it. I have seen pic- 
tures as good as that in New York.'' His seeing- 
power has had no such cultivation as to make him 
capable of judgment on such a work of art. But 
that Italian cardinal had seeing-power who, seeing 
on the bare walls of a poor boy's bedroom pictures 
sketched with bits of charcoal, stood in amazement 
at their accuracy and power, while the poor fright- 
ened boy offered to rub them all out. Thus Michael 
Angelo was discovered, an almost universal genius 
— painter, architect, sculptor, and poet. One of the 
strange inconsistencies of many men who are keen 
and sharp in commercial life, because they have 
cultivated assiduously the perceptions so far as they 
need them for trade, is that they never cultivate the 
highest faculties they have; only the lowest, the 
''bread and cheese faculties," as someone has called 
them. 

We have seeing-powers in the faculties we have 
cultivated. In the other faculties that seeing-power 
becomes dim and indistinct, until it finally fades into 
something akin to physical blindness. The worship 
faculty, the spiritually-discerning faculty, the im- 
agination — these need as wise a cultivation as our 
calculating faculties, if we would see beyond the lim- 
its which belong to unspiritualized man. That men 
who credit themselves with ability and intelligence 
should not see and feel this, is one of the mysteries 
of this perplexing personality of ours. How 
strangely would some of the men we meet look at 



LONG SIGHT 139 

US if we should say : ''Good morning, Mr. Manni- 
kin, how are you?" "Why, sir, do you call me 
Mr. Mannikin?" ''Why, because you have not yet 
attained to the dignity of a man. Even according 
to your oft-quoted Shakespeare, a man is 'a being 
of large discourse, looking before and after,' and 
you are not a being of large discourse, but of very 
narrow and contracted discourse, and thus you have 
not attained to the dignity of a man." 

We have vision in the faculties we cultivate — 
in none others. If our presence here this morning 
is not a cultivation of our worship faculty, our faith 
faculty, an effort to deepen our life, to give it in- 
sight, vision, and range by a steady gaze on the 
things which are unseen and eternal — then are we 
exceedingly short-sighted as to what these worship 
services aim at. When men and women get to the 
recognition that the spiritual faculties in our nature 
need cultivation as much as the merely intellectual 
faculties — the commercial faculties — then our use 
of such services as this will be more intelligent and 
less open to interruption. Wireless telegraphy rec- 
ognizes the fact that there is constant communica- 
tion along the aerial path between all parts of this 
universe. But if you would control the path and 
make your message travel along it, there must be 
at one end a producer, at the other a receiver. 
These must have the same relation to one another 
as the human voice of one man to the human ear 
of the other. 

It is so in the world of mind and spirit. A re- 
lation must be established between the spirit of God 



140 GLAD TIDINGS 

and the spirit of man before that still small voice 
which Elijah heard can make its whisper clear in 
the human conscience. Neglect the cultivation of 
the spiritual faculty — that faculty in w^hich our 
manhood inheres — and it will dry up and become 
atrophied. The fish in the Mammoth Cave of Ken- 
tucky have no eyes because there has no light been 
poured into them. Many a man has virtually lost 
inner vision because he has not used it. The cul- 
tivation of spiritual faculty is as essential as the 
cultivation of muscle or intellect. If once that per- 
ception becomes clear, then of that utterly silly talk 
about why men do go to church and why they don't 
go to church we shall have heard the last. Culti- 
vation is essential to vision, to seeing-power, to that 
long sight which was the apostle's when he wrote : 
"While we look not at the things which are seen, 
but at the things w^hich are not seen : for the things 
which are seen are temporal; but the things which 
are not seen are eternal.'' 

Our third idea was that the experiences of life, 
especially those which probe us to the quick, are 
necessary to that long-sightedness of which the 
apostle speaks. Few who have lived into maturity 
of years but have had something which has shaken 
them to the center. Death, bereavement, loss of 
goods, disgrace in some form coming into a family, 
the treachery of some friend, the malignity of some 
foe, something — some one of a hundred events — 
has had the effect of pulling us up and making us 
squarely face some disagreeable facts. Things that 
touch us on the surface only are not competent to 



LONG SIGHT 141 

do the work in us that has to be done. How often 
we hear it said, "And that this of all things should 
have come to me; the very thing I most dreaded! 
If it had been something else I could have borne 
it!" Exactly like the case of the man in the He- 
brew psalm, who was wounded in a very sore place : 
"It was not an enemy that reproached me; then I 
could have borne it : neither was it he that hated me 
that did magnify himself against me; then I would 
have hid myself from him : but it was thou, a man 
mine equal, my companion, and my familiar friend. 
We took sweet counsel together; we walked in the 
house of God with the throng." He was touched 
to the quick and we are not astonished that he 
should exclaim in a vehement burst of wrath : "Let 
death come suddenly upon them. Let them go down 
alive into Sheol : For wickedness is in their dwell- 
ing, in the midst of them." Very wrong to get 
into such a state of ungovernable rage and swear; 
but oftentimes a relief and certainly that kind of 
man is much less dangerous than the man who is 
very self-controlled in regard to his ebullitions and 
then goes off quietly resolved on revenge. Peter 
can curse and swear. It is Judas who gives the kiss. 
That in life which touches a man to the quick, 
which creates an explosion at the very center of his 
being, elongates his vision by making him feel how 
unreliable and insecure many foundations for hap- 
piness are, and that only as the overwhehiiing im- 
portance of the things unseen and eternal grows 
upon us does a man gatlier into the sphere of his 
vision the wide landscape of human life, 



142 GLAD TIDINGS 

There is an old hymn which expresses the sur- 
prise which men often feel, even good men, at the 
way in which Providence seems treating them. 

'1 asked the Lord that I might grow 
In faith and love and every grace, 

Might more of his salvation know, 
And seek more earnestly his face. 

i 

''I hoped that in some favored hour 

At once he'd answer my request, 
And by his love's constraining power 

Subdue my sins and give me rest. 

''Instead of this he made me feel 

The hidden evils of my heart, 
And let the angry powers of hell 

Assault my soul in every part. 

" 'Lord, why is this,' I trembling cried, 
'Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?' 

'This is the way,' the Lord replied, 
*I answer prayer for grace and faith.' " 

Sometime, in some way, every child of God has 
to be probed to the deeps of his nature, that he 
may unfasten his gaze, glued almost on the things 
seen and temporal and turn it on things unseen and 
eternal. 

For only as a man has spiritual discernment has 
he anything approaching to fulness of vision. A 
man has trueness of vision when he sees things as 
they are. He has fulness of vision when he sees 
them in their right relation to all other things. If 
I were to put apostolic language into its modern 
equivalent it would be something like this: ''My 
dear Corinthian friends, I am almost worn out with 
prolonged service. My body is becoming enfeebled. 



LONG SIGHT 143 

I can't read now as well as I could. My eyesight 
is perpetually troubling me. The outward is fail- 
ing; but as a compensation (for there are always 
compensations in life) all the inward is being re- 
vivified day by day." If we would give to these af- 
flictions their real place and make them light, we 
must look far afield. We must remember how, in 
comparison with our immortal destiny, they are but 
for a moment and that they are doing something 
for us which needs to be done. You can bear it 
all. You can even be thankful for it, if only you 
will keep your mental eye fixed, looking "not at the 
things which are seen, but at the things which are 
not seen : for the things which are seen are tem- 
poral ; but the things which are not seen are eternal." 
All ungodly people (suggests the apostle) are 
short-sighted. They see only what is near and they 
give it an exaggerated importance. Their mental 
outlook is not long. They are cabined, cribbed, 
confined. They lack largeness of view and there- 
fore largeness of hope and anticipation. And St. 
Peter agrees with St. Paul, for he also puts the un- 
godly man's limitations in the very forefront of his 
second letter: "For he that lacketh these things 
[godliness and brotherly-kindness] is blind, seeing 
only what is near." You know the diflFerence be- 
tween a statesman and a politician is that the poli- 
tician sees only the one thing he is occupied with, 
the statesman sees it in its relations to all that sur- 
rounds it. For ten years past England has been 
cursed with politicians masquerading as statesmen, 
with the result of burdening the people with an 



144 GLAD TIDINGS 

enormous taxation, setting one class against another, 
producing collision and confusion everywhere. 
Statesmen unify nations, politicians divide them. 
Politicians see only v^hat is near. Statesmen see 
afar off. Sincere godliness of disposition means not 
only insight, but outlook. 

Let us not mistake the apostle's meaning. He 
does not ask us to despise the temporal. How could 
he? How could the man who wrote these words: 
''The invisible things of him since the creation of 
the world are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting power 
and divinity; that they may be without excuse" — 
how could the man who wrote those words despise 
the present, or speak scornfully of material things? 
Vv^'hy, he says they reveal "everlasting power and 
divinity" — so reveal it that the godless man is 
''without excuse." The man who never looks in his 
Bible — the man who practically has no Bible, is 
still without excuse. Why? Because the whole 
creation in which he is ensphered speaks of God. 
People may tear the Bible to tatters. They may de- 
spise it, ignore it. They may hate the Church. A 
m.an may say : "I am outside all this. I have no in- 
terest in it. I have no use for your Church." What 
then? Have you no use for the earth on which you 
stand? For the heavens above your head? But 
these speak clearly of eternal power and divinity — 
so that you are still without excuse. Your ungod- 
liness proves your blindness, your lack of eyesight, 
your poverty of mind, your want of intelligence. 
Our apostle looked on the things that are tem- 



LONG SIGHT 145 

poral as not looking on them, but as looking 
straight through on the things eternal which they 
represent and for which they prepare. He looked 
on them just as one looks on a window-pane when 
one studies the landscape without. In one view one 
looks on the glass. In another one does not. Or, 
a better comparison still is the telescope; for the 
lenses of glass here interposed actually enable the 
spectator to see, and yet he does not so much as con- 
sider that he is looking on the lenses, or using them 
at all ; he only looks on the stars. 

What a monstrous abuse a man is making of the 
things around him, when he is so using them as to 
make himself more and more blind to the invisibles 
they were meant to represent ! We first make idols 
of them for their economic uses and their market 
value, and then, having begun our worship, we go 
on with it until our vision is so blurred, blunted, and 
contracted, till we become so near-sighted, that we 
can see nothing else. 

Two Scotchmen were arguing (as Scotchmen are 
sure to do) about their farms. Said one : 

"The beauty of the landscape on one part of my 
farm is unequalled in this whole region. Why, I 
can see the Isle of Arran and the waters beyond." 

"I can see farther than that," said the other, 
"much farther." 

"See farther than that — why, there is not a re- 
spectable hill on all your estate!" 

"I can see the moon and stars," quietly remarked 
his canny neighbor. 

And so the godly man, the man whose mind is 



146 GLAD TIDINGS 

open, whose intelligence is alert, whose imagination 
is alive, whose faith is full of eyes, can see time and 
all things temporal ; but he can see that time is only 
a mere babe held lovingly in the arms of eternity. 

True religion is a telescope through which we 
penetrate all the fog and mirk of the dense atmo- 
sphere which surrounds our life into the eternal 
empyrean which is above and about us — yes, into 
the very heart of God. 

The sanctified heart has always the seeing eye. 
''Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see 
God." How long-sighted was our New England 
Quaker poet when he wrote the beautiful lines: 

''I dimly guess from blessings known 

Of greater out of sight, 
And with the chastened Psalmist, own 

His judgments too are right. 

*'I long for household voices gone, 

For vanished smiles I long ; 
But God hath' led my dear ones on, 

And he can do no wrong. 

*'l know not what the future hath 

Of marvel or surprise, 
Assured alone that life and death 

His mercy underlies. 

"And if my heart and flesh are weak 

To bear an untried pain. 
The bruised reed he will not break, 

But strengthen and sustain. 

"And so beside the silent sea 

I wait the muffled oar; 
No harm from him can come to me 

On ocean or on shore. 

"I know not where his islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond his love and care." 



II 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 



And the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him in a 
-flame of lire out of the midst of a bush: and he 
looked and, behold, the bush burned with fire, 
and the bush zvas not consumed, — Bx. j;^. 



XI 
THE VISION IN THE BUSH 

The Bible is full of visions. If we ask ourselves 
what visions are, we shall have to come to the rec- 
ognition that they were ^^times of extraordinary 
elevation of thought and feeling, times therefore of 
illumination/' These visions were not general, but 
special. They are confined to men of a certain great 
order, Moses, Elijah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others, 
who stood out from average men as employed by God 
in national crises and for special purposes. Whatever 
we may think about visions, these men to whom 
they came must have regarded them as specialized 
communications to them, for they acted on the 
revelations which came through them. Their Hves 
were lifted by them on to a higher plane. The 
vision was an introduction to an invitation to a new 
obedience and a new service. As in Saul's case on 
the way to Damascus, the vision changed all his 
thought and feeling and therefore all his life. 

If we were to say that a vision was a truth pic- 
torially imaged to the imagination we should proba- 
bly commend ourselves to the modern tendency to 
reduce everything to the level of the experience of 
common men. But I don't know that we should 



150 GLAD TIDINGS 

gain anything in the process. Indeed, may we not 
lose a great deal? I love to think that in all gen- 
erations God has some men to whom he can speak 
more intimately than to others. This attempt to 
reduce all men to a dead level of spiritual suscepti- 
bility is a miserable business. Trades unionism for 
mutual helpfulness is good and w^orthy, but when 
it tries to drag the most capable and competent men 
down to the level of the most indolent and inefficient 
it seems to me a kind of conspiracy against that 
which is most regal in our human nature. That 
which we ought to recognize is that every man of 
great endowments is a great servant, a leader and 
deliverer of men out of servitude, as in the case 
of Moses. And such men, when they hear the call 
of God, must be at liberty to serve God. Of all 
kinds of liberty this is the most necessary for men 
and should be jealously guarded above all others. 
This is the liberty for w^hich our Pilgrim Fathers 
left land and home, that they might have ''freedom 
to worship God.'' 

I don't know of anything more interesting, more 
instructive, more stimulating, than to look upon a 
man at the moment w'hen he recognizes that there 
is in him a call to some high duty, some great service, 
to which he is impelled, yet from which he shrinks. 
This vision gives us a great moment in the life of this 
great man. He had long been brooding over the con- 
dition of his people in Egypt, humiliated, enslaved. 
God had been preparing him for this great moment, 
this crisis hour in his life — preparing him by that 
wonderful deliverance of his from drowning in the 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 151 

Nile, preparing him by making the enslavers of his 
people the custodians and tutors of the man who 
was to be their deliverer, preparing him by that 
burst of holy and irrepressible indignation in which 
he had slain an oppressor of his people — the event 
which separated him from the seductions and fas- 
cinations of the Egyptian court — preparing him 
by a long period of pastoral meditation on the sheep- 
strewn plains of Horeb. Divine Providence had 
never let go of this man. It was with him as with 
Paul. After his decision for Christ's service, Paul 
saw that God had been preparing him for his apos- 
tleship from the first hour of life, so that he could 
write : "When it was the good pleasure of God, who 
separated me, even from my mother's womb, and 
called me through his grace, to^ reveal his Son in 
me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles/* 
So, likewise, God revealed to Cyrus, the great Per- 
sian leader : *'I will gird thee, though thou hast not 
known me/' So is it. We can never explore the 
deeps of that Divine Providence in which we are 
all held. 

Moses was fitted to receive this vision and to in- 
terpret it. You and I might never have seen the 
vision, or heard the voice, or been able to interpret 
the event. Men don't see with their eyes, they see 
with the mind and much more with their spiritual 
nature. It was the divine in Moses which recog- 
nized the divine out of him. That bush represented 
the nation to which he belonged as it was in the 
fiery furnace of persecution. It also s])oke of the 
divine care for the nation, notwithstanding its en- 



152 GLAD TIDINGS 

slavement. And yet further, it spoke of the divine 
care for this very man whose earHer Hfe was fail- 
ure. He had the greatest of opportunities in the 
royal court of Egy^pt, but he could not make 
the most of them, because his heart was with his 
oppressed people. He was drawn in contrary direc- 
tions. The selfish part of him was drawn Egypt- 
ward, the noble part of him was drawn toward his 
own nation. 

When, forty years before this vision, the nobler 
impulses controlled him, his people made no re- 
sponses. Slavery takes the heart even out of the 
best. x-\nd so Moses had sunken in his own esti- 
m.ate to the level of a mere useless agitator, a sort 
of Jack Cade, and in disgust he went into the 
quietude of ]\Iidian and there, for the long space 
of forty years, mused and meditated in the loneli- 
ness of pastoral life until old age seemed creeping 
on and the mystery of it all probably became op- 
pressive, ^laybe he was saying within himself: 
''God hath forsaken me, my God hath forgotten 
me. 

It was then that the call came, then that the desert 
became once more aflame with God, then that a 
common bush began to burn with a new radiance, 
a bush burned into a sanctuar}'! And this great 
soul had the revelation in a form in which he could 
not misunderstand it, that God had not forsaken his 
people and he had not forgotten his Moses, and that 
all the past experience of his life, which seemed to 
have been thrown away upon him, began to count. 
Is it not by studying carefully and prayerfully the 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 153 

lives of these great men that we may the better get 
to understand our own? 

For myself, I have a special fondness for the 
visionary and the poetical and biographical parts of 
Holy Writ, and indeed under those three adjectives 
we include about all there is of supreme worth. I 
seem to get nearer to the heart of things, as to the 
meaning of the history of the Israelite people and 
the church of the ages, when I see the bush burning 
with fire but not consumed, when I hear the voice 
of the Lord God speaking out of that bush and 
when I recognize that only as I have deep reverence 
of soul (only as I take off my shoes from my feet 
recognizing that the place where I stand is holy 
ground) can I hear the voice or understand it. 

If, then, in this '^burning bush'' poetical minds in 
all ages have seen a picture of the Church of God, 
may we not join our thought and feeling to theirs 
and see in this vision what the spirit of the Church 
is, where the leadership of the Church is, what the 
mission of the Church is, and what its endowment 
and the relation which the Church has to the world 
in which it finds itself? Of course we can only make 
suggestions. 

In asking what the spirit of the Church is, we 
cannot but recognize that the temper of the age in 
which we live is not one of reverence. *^Put oft* 
thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon 
thou standest is holy ground.'' Does that passage 
express the temper of our times? We are so occu- 
pied with the things around us that we lose interest 
in the things above us. Even in the Church itself 



154 GLAD TIDINGS 

we are so occupied with the business side of things 
that we lose the power of appreciating such words 
as those of the wandering patriarch : ^^How 
dreadful is this place! this is none other but the 
house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." In 
too many of our churches preaching is everything, 
worship nothing. Consequently preaching, even 
when it is an intelligent and faithful exposition of 
the truth as it is in Jesus, is spiritually inefifective. 
When men have lost their ability of worship, their 
ability of understanding, the divinest truth will leave 
them. For the Spirit of God is the creator of in- 
telligence as well as of aspiration. The true spirit 
of the Church, be it ever remembered, is one of pro- 
found reverence. 

As to the leadership in the Church, or as we 
oftener put it, as to authority in the Church, where 
is it? In our vision the voice of God was heard 
and all other voices were stilled. *'I am the God 
of thy fathers." Tender and gentle was the voice, 
but authoritative. Only the pure in heart hear the 
voice of God. Others hear the voice of nature, the 
voice of reason, the voice of conscience, and they 
argue with these. But a Moses knows that the voice 
he hears does not originate in himself. And a 
Christian has a spiritual discernment of the voice 
of his master. If a common house-dog can discern 
his master's voice, surely a Christian can. That 
voice is to him authoritative as no other voice is. 
Only as a minister of the Church preaches Jesus and 
the Resurrection, with all the infinite wealth of sug- 
gestion contained in the personality of the great 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 155 

Master, has he authority. Wherever the voice of 
Christ is not final in a church the church has left 
its first love. It has lost its distinctiveness. A 
church is distinctive over all other assemblies in that 
the head and heart of it is the Sovereign Saviour 
Christ. 

As to the mission of the Church, has our vision 
of the burning bush nothing to say on that? The 
two thoughts which emerge are those of illumina- 
tion and deliverance. The light of God and the 
power of God — these ideas we cannot miss. Every- 
one is familiar with the words of our Lord in the 
beginning of the Sermon on the Mount: **Ye are 
the fight of the world.'' That is illumination. ''Ye 
are the salt of the earth.'' That is purification. The 
ideas are essentially the same we have suggested to 
us in this vision. 

People laugh at us when we say that the mission 
of the Christian Church is illumination. ''Are not 
Christian people narrow in their ideas of life," they 
ask. Wait! Think! The man who turns on the 
electric light may be a man of small stature, and 
of few ideas. But if he holds in his hand the key 
which turns on the light, is he not the agent in il- 
lumination? The man who has Christ in his heart 
and Christ in his mind and Christ on his tongue, 
may be in himself this or that, but he has at his com- 
mand the noblest idea that has ever come into the 
world and the most subtle and penetrating force 
which has ever influenced tlie character of man. 
There is a constant tendency in the world to narrow 
down man's horizon, to belittle man, to make him 



156 GLAD TIDINGS 

less than a being with spiritual affinities. '*To have 
fought against and triumphed over that tendency is 
the great achievement of Christianity." 

There is also an awful tendency everywhere in 
society to impurity. Men, yes and women, in their 
salacious novels insinuate it ; argue for it. It is the 
most mysterious of sins. ''We have not yet found 
the way to talk much about it, without danger to 
that which we most wish to guard.'' Wherever 
charity has gone it has conserved the idea of purity, 
personal purity, domestic purity, as nothing else 
ever has. ''It is the flower of the Christian graces.'' 
No other form of religion and no type of civil- 
ization has glorified purity. If you were to take 
the lid off unchristianized society, the stench would 
poison the atmosphere we have to breathe. Light, 
salt — New Testament symbols — illumination, de- 
liverance — the Old Testament ideas. They are 
akin. They express the Church's mission in the 
world. 

Again, What is the Church's relation to the 
world — i. e,, to the society which lives only for the 
present? Does our vision of the burning bush help 
us to an answer? In the centuries behind us has 
not the Church of Christ been just this, a bush burn- 
ing with fire but not consumed ? Think of the per- 
secutions under Nero. Think of the revelations of 
the catacombs. Think of the cruel mockings and 
scourgings, bonds and imprisonment of some in all 
generations. Think of the Waldenses and Albi- 
genses, the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of 
England, the Covenanters of Scotland. In these you 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 157 

see the bush burning with fire but not consumed. 
Some one asked Renan, the Hterary Frenchman, 
what was necessary in order to start a new rehgion 
which should supersede Christianity. '*Oh, that's 
easy," he repHed. *Xive such a Hfe that you will 
be crucified and buried and then rise again on the 
third day." 

Men may persecute Christianity. Indeed, in 
some form, such persecution is certain to be. All 
our spiritual benedictions we were to receive ''with 
persecutions." As in the olden days, he that was 
born after the flesh persecuted him that was born 
after the spirit, so will it always be. 

But though the bush may be burned with fire you 
cannot consume it. After it is buried, Christianity 
has a curious way of rising again on the third day. 
Read history and see how often our Christianity has 
been affirmed to be irrevocably dying. "A faith 
which has come out alive from the darkness of the 
tenth century, the immeasurable corruption of the 
fifteenth century, the irreligious policy of the six- 
teenth, and the materialistic philosophy of the eight- 
eenth century, may face without shrinking the 
subtler perils of our own." Ever the symbol holds, 
''the bush is burned with fire but not consumed." 
Expect persecution in some form. Expect misrep- 
resentation. Expect to be maligned and slandered 
by the foes of Christ, but never expect defeat. The 
true note of Christianity is, "Rejoice and be glad, 
the Redeemer has come." "This is the victory 
that overcometh the world, even our faith." The 
bush may be burned with fire, consumed it cannot be. 



158 GLAD TIDINGS 

Why? What is the Church's endowment? 
What was the endowment of this great man when 
he went into Egypt from the vision of the burning 
bush to grapple with Pharaoh? What overcame 
his timidity? What nerved him? ''Certainly I 
will be with thee" was the divine promise. The 
divine presence, that is the Church's endowment. If 
I am doing God's work, I can depend on God's help. 

"He who bids us forward go, 
Cannot fail the way to show." 

Livingstone, addressing the students of Glasgow 
University, asked them if they knew what sustained 
him in the long, lonely seasons. It was the prom- 
ise: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
of the world." 

The Church is made up of individuals and if we 
could only see into each soul we should often see 
a bush burning with fire but not consumed. The 
Church is made up of individuals ; but of individuals 
every one of whom is engaged to be loyal to a Mas- 
ter. Mere individualism, pushed to unholy ex- 
tremes, would wreck a church. But individualism 
subordinated to Christ, that is quite something else. 
Indeed, no one of us realizes to the full his own in- 
dividuality until he has submitted himself to be led 
and controlled by the great Master of souls. Then 
the deepest things in a man wake up. In realizing 
Christ a man realizes himself. And never till then. 

I beg you, each of you, to get the inspiration out 
of this vision and make it your own. Because some 
day your own life may be as "a bush burning with 



THE VISION IN THE BUSH 159 

fire but not consumed" and if then you cannot hear 
the voice of God speaking out of the fire, it will go 
hard with you. 

I have seen many a man in circumstances to 
which this language might be applied, ''a bush burn- 
ing with fire"; many a woman; many a home; but 
the voice of the Lord God was heard out of it call- 
ing to higher service. That made the experience 
intelligible and luminous. If you would know more 
particularly what I mean, and how the voice of God 
calling to new knowledge and higher service is often 
heard in "a bush burning with fire but not con- 
sumed," let me give you an illustration from the 
biography of Mark Rutherford. He had a little 
step-daughter whom he could never understand. 
She was growing into womanhood without the bar- 
rier between her and him being removed, until one 
day sorrow — bewildering, crushing, overwhelming 
sorrow^ enters that home. He found he was un- 
able to face it. In that mood, helpless, the man 
stood; forward came the child. These are his 
words: **What a change came over that child! I 
was amazed at her. All at once she seemed to have 
found what she was born to do. The key had been 
discovered which unlocked and revealed what there 
was in her, of which hitherto I had been altogether 
unaware. Faculties unsuspected grew almost to full 
height in a single day. I remember once going to 
her cot in the night, as she lay asleep, and almost 
breaking my heart over her with remorse and thank- 
fulness — remorse that I, with blundering stupidity, 
had judged her so superficially and thankfulness 



i6o GLAD TIDINGS 

that it had pleased God to present to me so much 
of his own divinest grace. I had seen that king- 
dom of God through a Httle child/' The man's 
home, yes his own nature, had become a bush burn- 
ing with fire, and out of the bush the voice of God 
was heard. But when it was heard it was the voice 
of a little child. 

Some of you know what that means. Your house 
became like a burning bush, or yourself became like 
a burning bush, and then it was that for the first 
time with deep seriousness you asked the question: 
What does it all mean? And as you listened, be- 
wildered and awe-struck, it might be in the dead 
of night, out from the deeps of memory where they 
had been hiding, came words once heard but never 
appreciated or understood : '^Fear thou not, for I am 
with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God." 

It was a true insight, then, which saw in this 
"bush burning with fire but not consumed" a picture 
of the Church of God in the earth. The scene is 
poetical, fascinating, appealing to the imagination. 
It is more — it is full of luminousness, full of en- 
couragement, to see a man whose life till he was 
eighty years old was a mistake, a failure, rescued 
from his own disgust with himself, prepared by his 
failures for the noblest kind of work ever put into 
human hands. How do we know that our failures 
on earth may not be of more value to us in the great 
hereafter than our successes have ever been? 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 



// thou faint in the day of adversity^ thy strength 

is small — Prov. 24:10, 
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and 

travaileth in pain together until now, — Rom, 

8: 22, 
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time 

are not worthy to he compared with the glory 

which shall he revealed to us-ward. — Rom, 

8: 18, 



% 



XII 
THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 

I suppose there is not a man or woman here who 
has not more than once or twice had a mental strug- 
gle with this subject, of the miseries and sorrows 
of life. Not only philosophers, poets, and theo- 
logians ; but men of all kinds and in all places have 
impeached Divine Providence for making a world 
in which sorrows and miseries are experienced by 
all. Not a few men have said: ''If I had to make 
a world, I would make one very different from 
this." And when we ask: ''Well, what sort of a 
world would you make?" the answer generally im- 
plies that the objector to this world would make 
one in which everybody would be comfortable, in 
which there was no sickness and no pain and no 
poverty and no suffering of any kind. Comfort, 
freedom from risk, or danger, or liability, what- 
ever kind of a life a man lived — a world in which 
the sense of security and of satisfaction was un- 
interrupted and undisturbed. 

We have all had these ideas and feelings. We 
have all struggled with the problem. Especially 
when we have had losses and disappointments. In 
the lonesome hour of bereavement, in the hour when 
health seemed ebbing away, in the hour when we 



1 64 GLAD TIDINGS 

had to face losses in business^ or the treachery of 
some partner, in the hour when we found ourself 
put out of a position in which we had served faith- 
fully for many years, simply because it seemed de« 
sirable to merge the concern in some other, in the 
hour when we could not secure profitable employ- 
ment, notwithstanding integrity and capability, in 
the hour when the little child died, in the hour when 
some son or daughter flung aside all considerateness 
and filial kindness and duti fulness, and embraced 
the stranger as his or her chief blessing — in 
such hours we have all struggled with the prob- 
lem of the miseries and sorrows of life. It may be 
that our very faith in God and a Divine Providence 
working for good has been shaken in that hour. 
We were not quiet enough or calm enough to take 
all the thoughts which gathered about the events 
which disturbed us into consideration. One over- 
mastering feeling held us in its grip. A new and 
trying experience will act like a thunder-storm in 
nature when the whole world for a time seems to 
be in a hurly-burly of uncontrolled lawlessness. 

It is not then that we can find the thoughts and 
feelings which are necessary to bring steadiness and 
calmness. Already we must have stored them for 
use. When a room is on fire in your house, it is 
too late to think of sending to the city for the hand 
grenade you saw advertised. These must be pur- 
chased and got ready before time. Ministers make 
a great mistake if they assume that when a person 
is suffering in a severe sickness the time is oppor- 
tune for bringing the patient to recognize the di- 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 165 

vinity of Christian truth. Health is the time for 
storing the mind with the truths needed for com- 
fort and support in sickness. The time of freedom 
from acute calamity is the time to prepare for it. 
Not that we can anticipate when our troubles will 
come, or of what sort they will be. What I mean is 
that truth, like coal, needs to be put in before the 
cold winter weather swoops down upon the soul. 

No wise man will undertake to justify the ways 
of God to men. Only he who could see the end 
from the beginning could venture any such attempt. 
Nothing that I, or any one, could say would leave 
you without some doubts and fears. These doubts 
and fears are part of the discipline of life. But 
they need not, like highwaymen in the dark, have 
us down and jump on us. If only we can keep our 
feet — that is something. The language of the 
Psalmist may sometimes seem to us applicable to 
our own condition : "All thy waves and thy billows 
are gone over me!'' but they cannot overwhelm us, 
unless we lie down in them. So long as we can 
stand upright and keep our feet the waves and bil- 
lows may wet us but they cannot drown us. A man 
who is built like a stanch ship, with no worm-eaten 
timbers in his make-up, built in conformity with 
Nature's laws, each part of his nature supporting 
every other part, can stand a good deal of storm. 
Under the strain the timbers may creak, the ropes 
may wail in the wind, and it may seem for a while 
as if the ship would ^o to pieces. Hut the storm 
passes and she is there still, riding the ocean in 
quiet dignity. ''Without were fightings, within 



i66 GLAD TIDINGS 

were fears/' but the ship was mightier than her foes. 
**Aren't you afraid?'' I asked a man in a merciless 
storm. ''No, sir! I have faith in the ship, I have 
faith in her builders, I have faith in her captain 
and officers." 

After all, it is faith that saves a man when the 
tempest is on. Doubt never saved a man and it 
never comforted him either. I was sitting a few 
weeks ago by the bedside of a very fine and cultured 
woman. She was suffering quite a good deal. Her 
life had been a splendid fight with the ignorance 
and darkness of the world. And I was trying to 
give her a word of comfort. Her robust and well- 
trained mind had to be respected. Platitudes would 
not do. At last she said : ''I have thoroughly made 
up my mind to one fact — that perpetual happiness 
is not intended by this present order of things, nor 
perpetual pleasure, nor unbroken rest; but for the 
creation and development of character, I can't con- 
ceive of a better world than this." She had got hold 
of a great idea and everything in her life and ex- 
perience cooperated to fix it in a central place in 
her mind. 

And the way in which we are going to look at 
the miseries and sorrows of life, the attitude of our 
minds toward them, depends on what we think life 
is for. If it is for the creation of character — char- 
acter that shall fit us for nobler service in the fu- 
ture — then there is a very intelligible place for the 
miseries and sorrows of life. A world of spoilt 
children would be little better than a hell. A world 
of such personalities as ours is peopled with, with- 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 167 

out chastisement in it, would be a world of spoilt 
children. With all the miseries and sorrows in it, 
there are far too many of us who are spoilt children 
and prodigal sons and daughters. 

If this world was made to yield solid, settled hap- 
piness, it is a failure. If it was made that an elect 
minority of specially privileged people might have 
a good time while the vast majority of us toiled and 
slaved for them, then it is a world that must have 
been formed by a God who was no better than an 
Eastern despot. But if the world was intended to 
be a cradle and a school for men and women who 
should be developed into high, holy, beautiful, sym- 
pathetic character — a character full of noble har- 
monies which should make music in the ear of 
Eternal Love — a character beginning here, taking 
its direction here, but continuing on and on till it 
attains that ideal perfection which has always, like 
an angel of God, been visiting our imagination — 
then the light we need in which to read the meaning 
of the miseries and sorrows of life begins to flow. 

The sculptor stands there by the beautiful creamy 
piece of Carrara marble and he has chisel and ham- 
mer which he uses on it, till he seems to be wasting 
it and spoiling the whole block. The why and 
wherefore of a chip here and a blow there does not 
at first appear. But return in a month or two and 
a beautiful human figure begins to appear in most 
bewitching and graceful lines. Now you know 
what all the chipping and hammering meant. In 
the sculptor's mind was a design you did not see. 
He meant something ravishingly beautiful. Sup- 



i68 GLAD TIDINGS 

pose it is so in the matter of our human Hfe, are 
not the ''blows of circumstance" explained? Not 
fully perhaps, for things seem to be dependent on 
one another and we ourselves, with our saucy self- 
will, seem to have so much of regulative power over 
our own lives and the lives of others. The worker 
is not seen. Or as Huxley puts it, we seem to be 
playing a game of chess with the other player out 
of sight. We have individuality. We have free- 
dom. We are not simply a block of marble. We 
have self-consciousness, personality, self-regulation, 
and we seem to be doing so much ourselves that 
there is no room for the Great Worker. 

Has it never occurred to you, how we none of 
us are having our own way? Wouldn't you alter 
your life if you could? Would you not take some- 
thing out of it and put something into it if you 
could ? Would you not change things in your fam- 
ily life? In the business you are engaged with? 
Wouldn't I change some things in this church if I 
could? Most assuredly I would. It appears then 
that none of us are having our own way. Some- 
body is interfering with the individuality I call my- 
self. Emerson wrote to Carlyle during the Civil 
War : ''Beyond all question a Higher Will is in this 
war, for none of us are having what we want.'' 
And so it is in your life and mine. Unless we are 
mentally blind we cannot but see that some higher 
will than our own is working and it is sovereign. 

Admit this — as you must — and what then ? 
Think you not that many of our sorrows and mis- 
eries are of the nature of collisions, as when the 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 169 

other day two electric cars came together? When 
the human will comes into collision with the divine 
will something must happen. So far as the miseries 
and sorrows of life come from man's wilful defi- 
ance, or ignorant and contemptuous disregard of 
divine laws, we can understand them. If ignorance 
and unthinkingness and wilfulness were allowed to 
have their way unchallenged and unchecked, it 
would wreck the universe. A wilful child has been 
told, time and again, not to put his hand on a cer* 
tain electric wire, but watches for an opportunity 
when no one is by and does it. The shock he gets 
surprises and terrifies him. His will has come up 
against his father's will — which represents for that 
occasion the divine will — and there is a collision. 
Of that nature are many of the sorrows and mis- 
eries of life. It is possible to put all men and 
women into two classes — those whose mental atti- 
tude to the Highest represents willingness and those 
who represent willfulness. Jesus of Nazareth was 
Incarnate Willingness. ''My meat is to do the will 
of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." 
When wilfulness undertakes its fight with the di- 
vine w^ill, some form of resultant sorrow and mis- 
ery is certain. On that side we can get light on 
the miseries and sorrows of life. 

But that does not cover the whole ground. 
"Many sorrows shall be to the wicked." That 
seems right. It ought to be. Tlie miseries and 
sorrows of the good — that has been tlie problem 
of the ages. Why do the godless often prosper? 
Why are the godly often found in narrowed con- 



170 GLAD TIDINGS 

ditions with sore personal afflictions? Those have 
been the questions which disturbed. They are the 
problem of the book of Job — the sublimest discus- 
sion of the question to be found in ancient literature 
— the problem of the Psalms and the prophets. 
What answers can we give? How shall we com- 
fort souls that are perplexed? 

There is for some people a short and easy cut to 
the end of the problem. It is this: Seeing that 
life has in it so many risks, so many fell liabilities, 
so much sorrow and misery, it is better that the race 
should not be perpetuated and that children should 
not be born into a world like this. Surely I need 
hardly say to you that that at its root is atheism. 
It is the denial of God's goodness and power. 
Those who have no feeling and no perception of the 
divine goodness and power are outside the range 
of gospel appeal. 

To others such considerations as these may be 
helpful. First : We never see the whole of a thing, 
the whole of any human life. Second: We never 
fully perceive how our life in its sorrows and mis- 
eries operates to call out the best sympathies of 
other related lives and to deepen all the best ele- 
ments that life contains. The same Power which 
permits pain produces pity. 

''The experience of pain is the price we pay" for 
the knowledge of pity and the ability of compassion 
and sympathy. I used in my earlier days to think 
that passage, "Whom the Lord loveth he chasten- 
eth," to be awful. I don't now. I have seen too 
much of life. Human greatness is to be measured 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 171 

by its capacity for pain — mental pain, moral pain 
— by its capacity for kindness {i.e., kinnedness), 
by its sympathy, its fellow-feeling. When I see how 
the sorrows and miseries of life call out these finest 
human feelings and develop them, then I get light 
enough to walk by until the fuller light comes. 
When I come upon hard, unsympathetic natures, 
with very little human sympathy in them, men and 
women who can live on in coarse affluence with no 
effort to relieve and help the deserving or to com- 
fort the mourners; to whom the sorrows and 
griefs of humanity are nothing, providing they do 
not come close to them. I tell you honestly, breth- 
ren, that if God were to send to me one of his angels 
and tell me that if I would only earnestly pray for 
twenty-four hours that all the sorrows and miseries 
of the world should be stopped in their working, in 
the light of the experience I have had, I dare not do 
it. 

Suffering has no value in itself. But God's two 
great instruments for the deepening of human na- 
ture are love and sorrow. Indeed, love implies sor- 
row and sympathy. That is the great lesson of the 
Cross of Christ. 

And here let me say that the Christian disciple 
is at an immense advantage over others in facing 
this question of the miseries and sorrows of life. It 
may be that at this stage in our progress the ques- 
tion cannot be fully and satisfactorily answered to 
the intellect; but can it not be answered to the heart? 
Jesus Christ is not Ood's answer to the cry of the 
human intellect ; but to the cry of the human heart — 



172 GLAD TIDINGS 

the heart, and, I would add, the imagination. These 
are the two royal endowments of man. 

May I also remind you that it is this Jesus who 
has created in us the sensitiveness we have to the 
sorrows and miseries of life? 

May I also call your attention to what is very 
remarkable, that we have in the New Testament 
no indications that Jesus was ever puzzled or con- 
founded by the existence of these sorrows and mis- 
eries ? His attitude to them is an immense assurance 
that Love demands them for the purification of the 
beloved. 

I know how differently one feels after a storm 
is over, from what one does in it. I know how easy 
it is to talk to you under present conditions. And 
yet, this is the hour of sanity. No man is perfectly 
sane in feeling and judgment while misery has him 
in its grasp and sorrow is tearing at his heart. Men 
are not reasonable in times of high excitement or 
deep depression of feeling. Under such experiences 
one can forgive a man all his hard and even pro- 
fane words. It is too late to begin to get your first 
acquaintance with the compass and chart when you 
are in the storm out at sea. In the day of adversity 
a man cannot exercise a faith he has not got. He 
must have it ready. 

And so I will add only one word more — and I 
really think it is the truest I have spoken. The 
voice of all the miseries and sorrows of life is this : 
"This is not your rest." The effort to maintain 
ourselves in some very inferior state of pleasant im- 
mutability has to be made a failure. There is such 



THE DAY OF ADVERSITY 173 

a thing as perfection — completeness of life, full 
adaptability to the divine will. No lower state can 
be permanent. We must be moved out or shaken 
out, or frightened out, or scourged out of all lower 
into higher conditions. We make our nest. We 
build our home, and furnish it gracefully and 
grandly, and we say to ourselves : ''Here will I rest, 
ril spend my life deliciously. Fll run away from 
winter cold and summer heat. I will take splendid 
care of my health." In other words: ''Soul, thou 
hast much goods laid up for many years ; take thine 
ease!" And lo! just as you have got to that point, 
an arrow out of the dark pierces the heart of that 
fine boy of yours, whom you would have spoilt per- 
haps had he lived, and he is gone. God loved him 
more than you did and had the right to save him 
from something you never saw. 

Dear friends, we have to pass through sorrow of 
some kind before we know what it all means. And 
then, when we have passed through them, we know 
they meant love, for our hearts are more tender and 
our sympathies finer and deeper. But I beg of you 
not to despise the help you can get from the Man 
of Sorrows. When you get into your Gethsemane 
and on to your Calvary, that life will be both light 
and life. I am not talking of what I don't know. 
And I am sure our poet Whittier knew it, he had 
been there himself, when he wrote those exquisite 
lines : 

"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet, 

A present help is he; 
And faith has yet its Olivet 

And love its Galilee. 



174 GLAD TIDINGS 

**The healing of the seamless dress 

Is by our beds of pain, 
We touch Him in life's throng and press 
And we are whole again." 



THE UNIVERSALITY OE THE DIVINE 
PRESENCE 



Take not thy holy Spirit from me. — Ps. 51: 11. 



XIII 

THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE DIVINE 
PRESENCE 

On this first Lord's Day of a new year you can 
fancy a minister casting about for some text which 
shall have in it a truth of the first magnitude. For 
as one star differeth from another star in glory so 
one truth differeth from another truth in glory. 

The truth, that underneath man's life is the di- 
vine life sustaining it, informing it, vitalizing it, is 
a truth of the first magnitude. And yet, by people 
who are not thoughtful and prayerful it is a truth 
only in sound. It does not verify itself as a fact. 
We seem to be living our own life, in our own way, 
from our own resources. When we come out of 
the sweet dependence of infancy into the young 
manhood or young womanhood period of life, we 
develop self-consciousness. We are supremely con- 
scious of ourselves and of our own importance. We 
begin to assert ourselves. We begin to resent con- 
trol from outside. We claim an excessive and dan- 
gerous freedom. It is a critical period of life. A 
period in which young men and women fancy they 
know things so much better than their fathers and 



178 GLAD TIDINGS 

mothers know them is full of temptations and of 
pitfalls. 

Rossetti, the painter and poet, used to keep quite 
an assortment of strange creatures of the animal 
order in his garden because, he said, he delighted 
in having something around him that was not made 
ugly by self-consciousness. He delighted in ani- 
mals because they were so free from self-conscious- 
ness. He contended that all boys and girls were 
attractive, whatever their features, until self-con- 
sciousness developed and then everything was 
spoiled. And so with people generally. They are 
natural and interesting exactly in the degree of their 
approach to freedom from self-consciousness. 
Gracefulness is free spontaneity. There can be no 
free spontaneity to any one self-centered and self- 
consumed, and hence no gracefulness. There might 
be affectation of gracefulness ; but the real, genuine 
article is gone. 

The most surprising thing about a man (if you 
think long enough you will recognize it) is that he 
can take possession of his own life and use it as 
if it were a tool in his hand, or a piece of property 
into which he has come as possessor. We all of 
us seem to have a dual life, and one of our lives is 
using the other as a man uses his horse or his gun. 
Sometimes it is the higher life, the mental life, 
which is using the physical life; and sometimes it 
is the physical life which is using the mental life. 

This is how it seems. But when we search for 
reality, when we are determined to get at bottom 
facts, the truth dawns upon us that we can have 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE 179 

no self-originated independent life, any more than 
a flower can ; that we have nothing of our own, that 
all we have we have received, that every minute 
we live on sufferance, and that our dependence 
on a higher Power and a higher Will is perpetual. 
This is why men in all generations have been 
found who are pantheists. Everything to them is 
some form of the divine manifestation of itself. 
Goethe, the greatest German writer, represents the 
Invisible Spirit as saying: 

**In the currents of life, in the tempests of motion, 
In the fervor of act, in the fire, in the storm, 

Hither and thither, 

Over and under, 

Wend I and wander, 

Birth and the grave, 

Limitless ocean, 

Where the restless wave 

Undulates ever; 

Under and over 

Their seething strife, 

Heaving and weaving 

The changes of life. 
At the whirring loom of Time unawed 
I work the living mantle of God." 

And Wordsworth, again, in the familiar lines: 

'*I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

This recognition of the constant dependence of 
man for the sustenance of his life on some vital 



i8o GLAD TIDINGS 

influence, not originating in himself, has led philoso- 
phers to deny the freedom of the will and to make 
of every man a sort of animated machine driven 
by forces of which he has no control. The old 
Greek tragedians sang of Irresistible Fate and Con- 
trolling Fortune, as if each man were a piece on 
a chess-board, moved hither and thither by an in- 
visible hand. All which tends to show how reason- 
able and how^ necessary is that doctrine of Holy 
Writ which emerges in our text, as it expresses the 
cry of an illuminated soul: ^^Take not thy holy 
Spirit from me." 

Let us not suppose that the teaching of the Old 
Testament is as explicit as that of the New on the 
personality of the Holy Spirit. No one can read 
the Bible intelligently who neglects to recognize 
that it is an evolution from less to more, from the 
elemental to the advanced. There is growth of 
thought, growth of feeling, growth of every con- 
ception and idea, so that, in moral conceptions and 
spiritual insights, we are a long way ahead of the 
Old Testament writers. It would be a shame if 
we were not. Man's intellectual and spiritual de- 
velopment has been very gradual, but never in a 
straight line. Long is the time and wide the differ- 
ence between the prayers of the prophets of Israel 
and those of Jesus on the cross: "Father, for- 
give them ; for they know not what they do" — and 
of the dying Stephen praying in the very hour of 
his cruel martyrdom: "Lay not this sin to their 
charge." 

Contrast with these such a prayer as that which 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE i8i 

fell from the lips of the persecuted prophet Jere- 
miah : '*Thou art my refuge in the day of evil. Let 
them be put to shame that persecute me, but let not 
me be put to shame; let them be dismayed, but let 
not me be dismayed: bring upon them the day of 
evil, and destroy them with double destruction." 
Or that other prayer for the heathen, 'Tour out thy 
fury upon the nations that know thee not, and upon 
the families that call not on thy name; for they 
have devoured Jacob, yea, they have devoured him 
and consumed him, and have laid waste his habita- 
tion." Contrast these prayers and then infer what 
an enormous difference our Lord has brought into 
the religion of man's deepest life. 

It seems to me that one of the reasons, perhaps 
the chief reason, for our unintelligent views of 
Scripture-teaching is in this non-recognition of the 
spiritual development which is so manifest to stu- 
dents of the Bible as a whole. Are we not afraid 
to tell the children in our households and our Sun- 
day-schools that many of these Old Testament men 
were ignorant and wrong, good in intention, but 
often savage in feeling; unforgiving and revengeful, 
some few far in advance of the others, the gen- 
erality being on a level much lower than the Chris- 
tian level and that God was training them out of 
their lov/ moral conditions, as is illustrated to us in 
the picturesqueness of the book of Jonah and in 
the drama of Job? 

And yet these Old Testament people had a clear 
and distinct idea of God's nearness to all life. Not 
the same idea that Paul had, or Tohn the divine. 



i82 GLAD TIDINGS 

Nothing was done by man alone. ''Shall evil befall 
a city, and the Lord hath not done it?'' They lo- 
calized and nationalized their deity; but he was 
their '^refuge and strength, a very present help in 
trouble." Their consciousness of the divine pres- 
ence was far more real than it is with most people 
in our own time and in our own country. Among 
the ancient Israelites there were no atheists. They 
believed in the divine leadership. Jehovah re- 
deemed them from Egypt. He fed them in the wil- 
derness. All the bounties of nature were his gift. 
The rains and dews were his and the cattle on a 
thousand hills. The first-fruits of everything were 
to be ofifered to him. A tenth of all they had was 
the Lord's tithe. To use it for their own private 
purposes was to rob God. They were his people, 
''the sheep of his pasture." 

x\ll this is a long way ahead of the thought and 
feeling of many Americans. The most hopeless 
specimens of heathenism are found not among men 
who have never had the light, but among those who 
have had it and refused it. Not the men who have 
never had the opportunity of knowing of God's 
supremest gift to the world in Christ w^ill be event- 
ually at the farthest remove from the divine bene- 
dictions; but those who have had the opportunity 
and have let it slip. For life, when we come to 
look at it intelligently and seriously, means oppor- 
tunity, the opportunity to be something good and 
great. Creatively all men are children of God. In 
feeling and will they are not. That distinction is 
recognized in our sacred books, where all perma- 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE 183 

nent relationships are of spiritual essence and not 
simply of physical afifinity. Manhood is begun 
when we enter this world's life, it is perfected when 
the Spirit of God has brought us into living rela- 
tions to the Christ of God. 

"Take not thy holy Spirit from me" is a prayer, 
if we understood it and felt it as we ought, which 
would make us shudder. The possibility of such 
a disaster would fill every sensitive soul with dis- 
may. For what does it mean? It means the grad- 
ual subsidence of life in us, the fading away and 
failure of life, the withdrawal of life! It means 
the divine withdrawal from the soul, the ultimate 
extinction of life. 

We know how sad a thing it is to see physical 
life losing its powers and gradually fading away. 
Especially does it appeal to us when we see some 
young manhood or womanhood in its early prime 
fading, fading, fading. The color leaves the cheek. 
The form gradually loses the contour of health. 
The muscles relax. The voice becomes weak. The 
ability of locomotion fails. The steps totter. The 
blood becomes poor. The appetite wanes. Strength 
leaks out drop by drop. Fading, still fading — till 
the bright eyes close and the breath ceases. All 
man's efforts to arrest the process are vain. Such 
a process appeals to the most hardened. Many a 
strong man has broken down under such a trial who 
could have stood with steady nerve and unshaking 
hand before the cannori's mouth. Rut a j)rocess 
similar to that goes on underneath in the spirit of 
man, when God's spirit is withdrawn, and its tcrri- 



i84 GLAD TIDINGS 

ble nature does not appeal to us. Our Lord him- 
self and his apostles all taught that this personal 
spiritual influence, which steadily operates upon the 
spirit of man, could be as steadily resisted until it 
was quenched. 

It is never safe to be wiser than Christ and his 
apostles. The highest region of man's nature does 
not suffer compulsion. It yields only to persua- 
sion. Love can never be forced. It may be in- 
duced. Neither faith nor hope can be commanded. 
That is where Universalists make their big mis- 
take. They are poor psychologists. They get 
their conclusions first and bend their premises 
to fit them. It is never safe to be wiser than 
the great Master, who knew that there was 
a sin which had no forgiveness neither in this 
world, nor in that which is to come. The Holy 
Spirit of God, who spake through this old Hebrew 
Psalmist, would never have suggested to his mind 
this prayer, "Take not thy holy Spirit from me,'' 
if there had been no possibility of such withdrawal. 

Here then we have for our new year's start a 
truth of the first magnitude: That the central 
luminary of all human life is the Spirit of God in 
man. This it is which gives life to the conscience. 
This which convinces of sin. This which keeps 
alive in us the sense of justice. This which assures 
us of a final judgment on every human life. This 
which makes us perceive that Jesus is the Christ of 
God. This which reveals eternal life. This Spirit 
of God is the great illuminator, the great verifier 
of truth. This it is which makes prophets and 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE 185 

apostles and martyrs of men who are more suscep- 
tible to spiritual influences than ordinary men. 

It is this Spirit of God which speaks through all 
truth and through all truthful ministries. Not from 
men, but through men the word becomes the living 
word. It is this Spirit of God in man which prays. 

"Prayer is the breath of God in man 
Ascending whence it came." 

The question is of prime importance: When is 
a man yielding himself to these divine influences? 
When he fondly cherishes all highest and purest 
ideas. When he encourages all his noblest imagin- 
ings. When he fights his prejudices and his fears. 
When he cultivates his divinest sympathies. When 
he, like Paul, is obedient to that heavenly vision 
which has come to us in Christ. Then a man is fol- 
lowing that internal leading which is not denied to 
any man. 

But this life-giving and light-giving Spirit 
may be resisted. Yes, it may be quenched. There 
is the tragedy of our existence. The light within 
may become so dim as to put any one of us 
into that position referred to in our Lord's 
words: '*If the light that is in thee be dark- 
ness, how dark must the darkness be!" Incredible 
though it may seem to us, yet between the in- 
ternal state of one man and another there may 
be as much difference as between day and night. 
No night is all dark. There is something of light 
in the atmosphere in the darkest night. And no 
soul of man is all darkness. But relatively, one 
human spirit may be living in the daylight and an- 



i86 GLAD TIDINGS 

Other in the gloom of night where nothing is seen 
clearly and minutely. There is the fearful possi- 
bility of God's withdrawal from the human soul, 
and then the man becomes only a superior kind of 
animal living in his animal instincts and passions. 
The w^orld and the flesh are everything to him. He 
has no vision of the highest, deepest, noblest, grand- 
est things of life. This withdrawal of the Spirit 
of God from a soul is the direst conceivable 
punishment. Light has gone. Hope has gone. 
Pessimism has taken its place. Love has gone. 
Selfishness remains. Faith has gone. Doubt re- 
mains. The spiritual nature is a wreck. 

Assuming that this is David's prayer, I wonder 
if, w^hen he offered it, he was thinking of Saul, king 
of Israel, and of the sad tragedy of that despairing 
soul which, through disobedience, through doing its 
own will, regardless of its responsibility to God, had 
lapsed into a doleful melancholy. No more pitiable 
mental condition is conceivable than that of Saul 
in his latter days. The horror of it may have ap- 
peared to David and for one brief, sad moment he 
shuddered as he thought of the possibility of the 
Spirit of God being withdrawn from himself. That 
he, in his declining years, should become such an 
one as the Saul he had known, such possibility would 
put a shuddering emphasis into this prayer if any- 
thing would : "Take not thy holy Spirit from me." 

May I suggest to you that this might very well 
be our special daily prayer for the new year on 
which we have entered? There is room in our na- 
ture for fear. Fear has to do its work. "Let us 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE 187 

fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being left of 
entering into his rest, any one of you should seem 
to have come short of it" are the apostolic words 
of warning. Let us fear lest God's Spirit should 
be withdrawn from us. Because that Spirit is the 
spirit of life. It energizes and vitalizes every part 
of our being: 

*' 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant, 
More life and fuller that we want." 

sings Tennyson. St. Paul and Tennyson are in 
accord. 

"Be filled with the Spirit,'' says the apostle, 
''speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs, singing and making melody with 
your heart to the Lord." That is the sign of being 
filled with the Spirit. 

Oh, it is a sad thing to see a Christian becoming 
less and less a Christian, losing interest in Chris- 
tian worship and service, losing vitality, losing in- 
fluence, losing power. It is sad — sad — sad ! 
Even Paul had that experience, so that he had to 
write to some in the churches of Galatia : **Ye were 
running well; who hindered you that ye should not 
obey the truth?" 

*'Oh, yes!" you say, *'but. Minister, we get older 
and feebler!" "Wherefore we faint not; but though 
our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man 
is renewed day by day." That is the apostolic an- 
swer. That which is divine in man knows no age. 
"Take not thy holy Spirit from me," or life will lose 
all its charm, all its beauty, all its promise of some- 



i88 GLAD TIDINGS 

thing better than itself, all its meaning, all its use, 
and become cloudy, sad, empty, a burden, a sor- 
row, a disappointment; not a lovely dream, a radi- 
ant vision, a foretaste, a forecast, a prophecy. Bad 
as it is to have bodily blindness — it is infinitely 
worse to have that spiritual blindness which exists 
where the Spirit of God no longer finds free en- 
trance into the closed and shuttered windows of a 
darkened soul. A truly-lived life is a growth. 
Each stage is preparing for a stage beyond. Child- 
hood for youth, youth for manhood, manhood for 
age, and age for what? 

The other day a very famous leader among the 
scientific men of England had been invited to ad- 
dress a company of ministers and among other 
things he said to them was this : ''There is reason 
to believe that when we have lost our bodily organs, 
we shall only be able to communicate with those 
to whom we were allied here by links of sympathy 
and interest. The person who cuts himself off 
from his fellows and leads a narrow and mis- 
erly life on earth will be lonely in another life, un- 
less self-sacrificing spirits take pity on him." 
Strange language for a leader of modern science! 

Yes — the Spirit of God is preparing us for the 
next stage in our existence: 'It is not yet made 
manifest what we shall be." Thank God! Our 
hope for ourselves is that God will not .take his 
Spirit from us. Our hope for the world is that God 
will pour out of his Spirit on all flesh. We thank 
God that there is no possibility of any man's at- 
taining to a settled and permanent happiness who 



4 



UNIVERSALITY OF DIVINE PRESENCE 189 

resists the Spirit of God. We thank God for that 
great, that magnificent mind who, in the days of 
long ago, was able to base his hopes and expecta- 
tions on the universality of the divine presence: 

''Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me.** 

"O Spirit of the living God, 

In all thy plenitude of g^race, 
Where'er the foot of man hath trod, 

Descend on our apostate race." 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 



// / speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
hut have not love, I am become sounding brass, 
or a clanging cymbal, — i Cor, ly, i. 



XIV 
LOVE PREDOMINANT 

There is no more remarkable illustration of the 
superiority of nature of this great man, Paul, than 
this thirteenth chapter of the first epistle to the 
Corinthians. Above all miraculous gifts and en- 
dowments, above faith itself, he puts love. 

We should not have been greatly surprised to find 
this exalted position assigned to love in St. John, 
but to find it in St. Paul is somewhat startling. 
This man of many gifts sees something greater 
than gifts. This man of unconquerable faith sees 
something greater than faith. This man of dis- 
tinguished spiritual powers sees something greater 
than such powers. This is very surprising and all 
the more so when, looking carefully into Church 
history, we find that these apostles are ahead of 
the different stages of development in Church his- 
tory. They are theological leaders all the time and 
for all centuries, as much leaders in our century as 
in the centuries past. 

Constantly we have to go to the Bible to correct 
our partial and narrow views. Constantly we have 
to go to it for rescue from the tendencies to sec- 
tarianism which are in human nature. In presence 



194 GLAD TIDINGS 

of such a fact, why need we hesitate as to the in- 
spiration of these men? If men of the time of Paul 
and John can keep ahead, as Christian thinkers, of 
the majority of Christians in all centuries since, 
why need we hesitate as to their being men won- 
drously inspired of God? The influences of the 
Holy Spirit of God must have taken full possession 
of them or such a fact could not be. 

The main proposition which the apostle lays down 
in this section of his epistle to the Corinthians is 
this: That in all times and everywhere there is 
one great endowment for every Christian individ- 
ual and for every Christian church, an endowment 
so essential, so fundamental, that without it every- 
thing else is ineffective. Nothing is superior to this 
endowment. Everything namable is inferior to it. 
Miraculous gifts are inferior to it. A miraculous 
understanding is inferior to it. The vigor which 
comes from a faith so strong that it can remove 
obstacles that are like mountains is inferior. 
Benevolence which beggars itself to feed the poor 
is inferior. Sectarian zeal that can boldly march 
up to a martyr's death rather than give in, is in- 
ferior. And all these gifts and competencies are 
conceivable without the existence of this one en- 
dowment, which is not only superior to any one of 
them, but to all of them. The one endowment re- 
ferred to is in the old version called charity, in the 
new version, and more properly, love. 

That royal endowment which is thus introduced 
to us under this name is the one quality which gives 
permanent worth and value to all other qualities. 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 195 

That it is the greatest of all endowments will be 
seen if we consider its universality and its lasting- 
ness. It is something that everyone can have, for 
its seat is the heart. It belongs to ripeness of na- 
ture in all people and in all times. Everything that 
is intellectual, all mere knowledge and everything 
of the same nature as knowledge, passes away; but 
love abides. It never passes away. All eloquence, 
all speech-power is temporary and fleeting. As one 
puts it : **The next time you are disposed to be vain 
of a few facts, or a little reading, or a smattering of 
science, pause and think — that all the knowledge 
of the great and wise men of the apostle Paul's 
day, except the knowledge of Christ crucified, is 
worthless now. All they knew has vanished, 
all has failed but this, that 'they washed their 
robes and made them white in the blood of the 
Lamb.' " 

Let us remember that the worth of anything is 
to be estimated by these two qualities, lastingness 
or unfailingness and universality — the ability of 
belonging to everyone. That which has its seat in 
the intellectual part of our nature does not last and 
it does not belong to everyone. The knowledge of 
two or three centuries ago is not the knowledge of 
our century. Nothing remains the same. Views 
and opinions continually change because one opinion 
leads to another greater than itself. The progress 
from the less to the greater is necessary and inevi- 
table. The boy is not the man. The clothes that 
fit the boy will not fit the man. 

Religion has its intellectual side and on that side 



196 GLAD TIDINGS 

it changes and must change. It is Hke everything 
else in that respect. But as in every one of us there 
is something permanent v^hich abides unchangingly 
and brings every part of our life into unity, making 
it one life, so is it v^ith religion. Properly speak- 
ing, the v^ord religion is only another word for a 
man's deep inner life. Every man has a religion, 
w^hether he calls it by that v^ord or not. The deep- 
est thing in the Christian religion never changes. 
That deepest something which St. Paul calls love 
never changes. It is the central substance which 
binds all and everything into unity. 

When therefore we meet with a question like this : 
How can a man be satisfied that he has got the 
right thing in religion, when there are so many 
creeds, and so many views and opinions, and so many 
sects and denominations ? How can there be any con- 
fidence and any settledness? When we meet with 
such questions the answer is simple and easy. There 
is an underneath-something in all true religion 
which never changes — which grows from less to 
more, but never changes in any essential character. 
St. Paul calls it "Love.'' If you can love God and 
love your fellow men, that is all you need. 

Simple as this statement is it includes vastly more 
than at first appears. To love God, we must know 
him. We must have a revelation of him. Has he 
given us such a revelation of his heart as to warrant 
us in saying, "Like as a father pitieth his children, 
so the Lord pitieth them that trust him"? Such 
a revelation as warrants our saying: "Our Father 
who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. . . . Thy 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 197 

will be done, as is in heaven, so on earth" ? If so 
— where is it? It must be in a person, for a per- 
sonal is necessarily the highest form of revelation 
and the only one suited to us. And so Jesus Christ 
becomes a religious necessity. But what we need 
to recognize is that we may have gifts that are bril- 
liant and helpful and yet not have love. We may 
have intense sectarian zeal and not love. We may 
be so bigoted religiously as to be blinded by our own 
bigotry and blindly go to the stake and give our 
bodies to be burned (false religions have had their 
martyrs) and yet love like that Paul exalts we may 
not possess. 

This seems very startling, almost unintelligible, 
and yet there can be no doubt it is true. We have 
only to look at the results of blind religious zeal, 
to see how true it is. The bitter sectarianism which 
has sprung up inside Christianity is proof of its 
truth. Men will very often do for sect what they 
will not do for Christ and Christianity simply. 
There are very many men who are not mentally or 
affectionally large enough to let in the greatness 
of pure apostolic Christianity; but they are just 
large enough to be first-class sectarians. 

No one was in such diametric antagonism to this 
spirit as was St. Paul. He never seemed to glow 
with such angry indignation as when these Corin- 
thian Christians were in danger of splitting up into 
sects under different names: ''I am of Paul; and I 
of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is 
Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? or 
were ye baptized into the name of Paul ?" 



198 GLAD TIDINGS 

Of all necessities to a revived apostolic Chris- 
tianity, do we not need to recognize that one thing 
which is above all other things, that one thing set 
forth in this thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle 
to the Corinthians ? We may have much knowledge 
of Scripture. We may have great and brilliant gifts. 
We may even be consumed with sectarian and ec- 
clesiastical zeal. And yet, tested by this apostolic 
test here given, we may be lamentably defective in 
Christian character. "If I speak with the tongues 
of men and of angels, but have not love, I am be- 
come sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And 
if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all myster- 
ies and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so 
as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am 
nothing." 

This language may seem very startling and very 
saddening until we look more deeply into it. And 
then the light begins to shine out of it and with the 
light comes the heat and it makes summer in the soul. 
It sweeps into the net of Christian hope thousands 
upon thousands who 'otherwise would be kept out. It 
brings us into living fellowship with all men every- 
where in God's world who have had a regenerated 
disposition, a true and honest heart, whether the head 
has been the treasure-house of intelligent opinions 
or not. True, it excludes many, very many, fierce 
militant spirits in all churches and all ages whose 
hatred has got the better of their love, men who 
cried out lustily, '*The temple of the Lord — the 
temple of the Lord!'' But it includes, oh, thou- 
sands of men who in loving brotherliness have ever 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 199 

been timidly and distrustfully moving by their quiet 
influence, in the direction of making men feel that 
the world is not so cold and hard as sometimes it 
seems to be. In a word, St. Paul here exalts a re- 
generated, love-filled disposition over everything 
else — above fervid eloquence, above prophetic en- 
dowments, above brilliant gifts, above fiery zeal, 
even above conquering and unconquerable faith. 

That surprises us most. Is it not almost astound- 
ing that he should say, *lf I have all faith, so as 
to remove mountains, but have not love, I am noth- 
ing"? That surely must be an imaginary case, for 
such faith must work by love and need a soil of love 
in which to grow. But the expression only shows 
how absolute the necessity for this most essential 
of all endowments, that love which abideth still 
when all such elementary and childish knowledge 
as that we now have, has passed away. 

How important then to know what this love is 
which the apostle exalts above all other endow- 
ments or possessions of the human soul! On in- 
quiry we find it is the opposite of impatience, of 
unkindness, of the spirit of boastfulness, of pride, of 
rudeness and vulgarity, of self-seeking, of anger, 
of suspiciousness of disposition, the opposite of 
falseness and every form of injustice, and tliat it is 
the mO'St patient, gentle, sanguine, and hopeful of all 
qualities of soul. Peaceableness, generosity, inno- 
cence, and unsuspiciousness, these are all in it. 

Are we not right, then, in styling it ''the regener- 
ated disposition''? No other word can express it. 
No power but that of the Holy Spirit of God oper- 



200 GLAD TIDINGS 

ative on the human soul can create it. Robertson 
remarks: "The apostle here describes a Christian 
gentleman, not simply a high-bred man of courtesy. 
High-breeding gracefully insists on its own rights. 
Christian courtesy gracefully remembers the rights 
of others. The spirit of Christ does really and thor- 
oughly what high-breeding only does outwardly. 
A Christian is what the highly-bred worldly man 
only seems to be.'' 

It seems to me much better to keep the idea be- 
fore us that the apostle is telling us what are the 
signs of a regenerated disposition and that all else 
of gifts and competencies without it are defective. 
At best they are partial, as substitutes they may even 
be mischievous. This then is what all Christian dis- 
ciples should aim at. This brief chapter in St. 
Paul's letter to the Corinthians should be in our 
memories, supplying constantly its suggestions for 
character and conduct. If we are renewed in dis- 
position, if the spirit of Christ is in us, if we have 
the mind of Christ, if the Spirit of God has been 
yielded to, the signs of it will be according to the 
words here written. The battle will oftentimes, and 
especially with some of us, be very hard. All the 
greater will be the satisfaction in fighting and con- 
quering. For we must cooperate with God's Spirit. 
We are not machines to be operated upon from 
without, but men and women with capabilities of 
self-determination. That gives dignity to our nature. 

To an extent unknown to any other creations, we 
make or unmake ourselves. We determine our own 
character. We fix our own destiny. Every animal 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 201 

has but a very limited range of changeableness in its 
nature. The dog may be more or less sagacious; 
but the difference between the least sagacious and 
the most sagacious of dogs is not very much. But 
consider the difference between the lowest and high- 
est specimen of man! So great is the difference 
that the two men seem scarcely to belong to the 
same order of beings. And when we analyze the dif- 
ference, where do we find its seat? Not in the 
physical form, though between the dwarf and the 
giant there is a very impressive difference. Not so 
much in the difference of intellectual gifts, striking 
as it often is, as in the differences in character. The 
man who acts from love and the man who acts from 
hate — between them how great the difference ! all 
the difference between salvation and destruction. 
For love means salvation, hate means destruction. 
The loving heart would save everyone from all 
which is hateful and wrong. The hating heart 
would selfishly and fiendishly destroy men in order 
to exalt or gratify itself. 

The real difference between one man and another 
is not in the physical region, nor in the intellectual 
region, but in the deep character which underlies 
both. Love is only the abstract word of which 
heaven is the concrete. Hatred is only the abstract 
word of which hell is the concrete. To cherish love 
is to grow heavenward. To permit in ourselves the 
development or hatred is to grow hellward. If we 
would ever bear this in mind, we should have no 
trouble about the question. What is a Christian char- 
acter? Nor should we have any difficulty of a very 



202 GLAD TIDINGS 

serious nature as to the tendency to cultivate most 
ardently in our life. The way of life is not drifting. 
Effort is needful : effort to subdue something, 
effort to promote something. What shall I 
subdue? What shall I foster? What tendencies 
in me shall I fight? What tendencies shall I care 
for, cultivate, and cause to grow ? The apostle tells 
us in this chapter. 

Oh, what a character he draws here! And this 
is the Christian character. Even if anyone says, 
'*It is too good for this bad world," yet every one 
of us must allow its attractiveness. What homes 
there would be if this character were diligently cul- 
tivated! What churches there would be! Ecclesi- 
asticism would not be a Christian world, as it is 
now — a section of the world ecclesiasticized. But 
it would be a Christian Church ruled by apostolic 
ideas and by the apostolic spirit and temper illus- 
trated in this chapter. 

Church history is painful reading and the reason 
of it is largely in this : that Christ and the Christian 
spirit and temper have not been allowed supremacy. 
The old feuds, which in the Corinthian Church made 
Paul so indignant, have been, by unapostolic men, 
fixed and made permanent in the church-world of 
past times and of our time. And men love to 
have it so. It is so much easier to be a Jew, 
or a Gentile, or an Englishman, or an American, 
or a German, or Frenchman, or Irishman, than 
it is to be a great human, large-hearted son of Adam 
who was the son of God. When the Roman orator 
rose in the assembly declaring, "I am a man, noth- 



LOVE PREDOMINANT 203 

ing human is foreign to me/' all the people broke 
into thundering applause. 

That is a great human sentiment and, so far, 
Christian. And all great human sentiments are 
Christian. Everything that unites man to man in 
brotherhood and sympathy is Christian. But it is 
so much easier to be a slice of a Christian than to 
be a whole Christian, that very few whole-hearted 
Christians are found. It is so much easier to be full 
of zeal, angry zeal against others, than it is to re- 
press that feeling and be sincerely desirous to give 
and receive the pure love of human hearts. And 
there is no pure love till Christ has made it pure. 
Only as we recognize that the exalted Jesus Christ 
is working ever in the direction of bringing men 
and women upward toward the condition here set 
before us, can we ever believe in its attainment. 

But the first of the fruits of the Spirit is love — 
that disposition to forgive iniquity, to help and bless 
others, to be of use and service, to bring men out 
of hostility into unity, to be brothers and sisters 
in Christ, to repress envy and strife and hostility in 
speech and deed. 

Emphatically is this the spirit of this Lord's Sup- 
per, which we invite all who love our Lord Jesus 
Christ in sincerity to celebrate to-day. It is lovers 
engagement ring worn on the finger of Christ's 
bride, the Church. By it we confess modestly and 
humbly, but sincerely, that he who won the love 
of Paul and John, Matthew and Thomas, Mary and 
Martha, has won our love too. We confess nothing 
but that. Conscious of living, to the extent to which 



ao4 GLAD TIDINGS 

they will allow us, in love and charity with our 
neighbors, willing to injure no one, willing to help 
any one, with such weak help as is in us, we take 
the bread and drink of the cup. It is love's request. 
We listen and are glad. Its simplicity is its charm. 
It has no dignity except the dignity of his appoint- 
ment. It means nothing to the man that does not 
connect it with Christ, nothing to him who does not 
recognize that Christ has called men into Church re- 
lations and this is the sign of such relations. It has 
no meaning except as it represents Christ and the 
Church. 

Then its meaning is deep, indeed. It is love's 
dying request and where there is a loving heart, 
there surely ought to be love's response. 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 



Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. 
Hear now, O house of Israel: Is not my way 
equal? are not your ways unequal? — Bzek, 
18:25. 



XV 

THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 

If we had to give an immediate and direct an- 
swer to this question: Is not my way equal? we 
should be disposed to say: Decidedly not. God's 
ways in the treatment of men do not seem to be 
equal. The very opposite seems to be the case. 
From the beginning to the end of life there seems 
to be inequality, not equality. No two persons are 
alike either in mental endowment or in the condi- 
tions which surround their life and give to it its 
opportunity. The first impression that everyone 
must get from the presentation which society gen- 
erally makes of itself is that the ways of the Lord 
are not equal. 

Consider, first of all, how men are born. Birth 
is something so entirely removed from the region 
of personal responsibility that no one of us is to 
be held accountable for anything belonging to it. 
I have positively no responsibiHty for being born. 
That responsibiHty is back of me in the keeping of 
God and his laws and in the parentage through 
which, as a gateway, I came into this world. And 
the same is true of every one of us. Yet how much 
depends on being well born. Some thinking men 



2o8 GLAD TIDINGS 

have said that half the battle of life is won or lost 
according as an individual is well or ill born. The 
two ideas of heredity and environment are contin- 
ually brought to the front in all our modern think- 
ing. How much a man owes to one and how much 
to the other is in chronic debate. General state- 
ments on such questions are very apt to mislead. 
Life is too subtle and too profound in its sources 
to make it possible for us to dogmatize on these 
themes. A good heredity must be a good thing. A 
good environment cannot be undesirable. But what 
a good heredity is and what a good environment is 
admits of much inquiry. We know that children 
reproduce the features and characteristics of some 
ancestry. Yet seldom is the copy so close to the 
original as not to leave room for a strong play of 
individuality. The race of man is a unity consist- 
ent with endless variety. 

So in nations. There is a national type, but it 
is capable of an almost infinite difference in expres- 
siveness. Even in the same family own brothers and 
sisters are never precisely alike. Sometimes the 
differences are more remarkable than the re- 
semblances, and yet there will be a family something 
which speaks of basic unity. 

The idea of being bom well is one that has come 
more assertively into biological literature of late 
than ever before. The transmission of soul seems 
to be of more importance than the transmission of 
body. But w^hile to be born well physically is most 
desirable, yet to be born well mentally and tempera- 
mentally is more desirable still. To have had a 



i 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 209 

good ancestry, an ancestry in whose blood have been 
virtue and integrity, truthfulness, honesty, bravery, 
courage, must be an immense benediction. When 
David Livingstone's father on his dying bed said 
to his children : ''My children, I do not find in any 
branch of our ancestry any dishonest men or any 
men or women whose names do not stand for in- 
tegrity and godliness," we know that David Living- 
stone was well born. 

To be well born may mean socially well born; 
or it may mean much more than that, it may mean 
mentally, morally well born. The aristocracies of 
the world have never been overweighted with men- 
tal or moral worth. Living in luxury is not pro- 
motive either of strength or purity. In all England 
there are only three or four aristocratic families 
which date back in the direct male line even so far 
as the time of the Pilgrim Fathers. They have died 
out through moral defect. To be well born is to 
be born from an ancestry that has had in it the phys- 
ical and mental strength that comes with genera- 
tions of virtue and piety. 

Now when we examine into the facts of life, how 
very many people seem to be anything but well 
born. God's ways do not seem equal in this respect 
— certainly not on the surface. There are thou- 
sands of children born from vicious parents, children 
who inherit from the first tendencies to drunkenness 
and lust, who seem to be pushed along hell- 
ward from behind by the very ancestry along which 
has come the blood which flows in their veins. Very 
little chance do these seem to have of being good 



210 GLAD TIDINGS 

men and women. The chances seem all against 
them. Compare their heredity with that which be- 
longs to some of our friends here present, in whose 
ancestry has been no known criminal of any kind, 
no unvirtuous man, no impious woman. When we 
make such comparison it does not seem as if God's 
ways are equal. There seems even justification for 
Hood's satirical poem: 

"Born of Fortunatus* kin 

One comes tenderly ushered in 

To a prospect all bright and burnished; 

No tenant he for life's back slums — 

He comes to the world like a gentleman comes 

To a lodging ready furnished. 

"And the other sex, the tender, the fair, 

What wide reverses of fate are there! 

Whilst Margaret, charmed by the Bulbul rare, 

In a garden of Gul reposes, 

Poor Peggy hawks nosegays from street to street, 

Till — think of that, you who find life so sweet — 

She hates the smell of roses." 

Yes, this inequality of condition on the surface 
seems to com.pel us to affirm that all men are not 
born alike in endowments, in surroundings, and in 
opportunity; and that in respect of birth God's ways 
are not equal. 

Take a step forward and again ask the question 
about the age when nurture begins to tell. The 
word education covers a very much larger area of 
life than we ordinarily assign it. We associate the 
school-room with education; but there is more edu- 
cation given in the home and probably more in the 
street than in the place to which the word school- 
room is ordinarily applied. It is quite impossible 
so to limit the area of education as to confine it to 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 211 

that formal giving of instruction so as to wake up 
and train the intellect to memorize and think. The 
home in which we live, the company we keep, the 
books we read for fun and not as tasks, all are con- 
tributing to education. 

The word environment comes in here. In regard 
to that God's ways do not seem equal. 

Think of the surroundings of many a young life. 
Think how poor a place the home is. Think how 
pestilent a place the street isi Think of the profane 
tongues from which this young life learns its first 
speech. Think of all the vulgarity, the coarseness, 
the rudeness in the midst of which it has to spend 
its most impressionable years, and compare these 
with the surroundings of your own life — the com- 
forts and sometimes luxuries which have from long 
usage become almost the necessaries and common- 
place of life to you. You have always lived in 
wholesome streets. The language of home and 
friends has been full of kindliness and free from pro- 
fanity. There has been little if anything which in 
the surroundings of your life could be called rude- 
ness, coarseness, and vulgarity. You have had every 
kind of opportunity for mental and moral culture 
which a kind Providence could furnish. With some 
of you pleasant surroundings have been so constant 
that they have largely destroyed the robustness of 
your individuality and produced enfeeblement. You 
have lain in the lap of luxury until all your limbs 
are relaxed and you object to do anything that is 
not easy and comfortable and in the line of your 
desires. The opportunities of education which 



212 GLAD TIDINGS 

come to some, contrasted with the vicious ignor- 
ances and coarse immoralities by which others are 
surrounded, do not enable us easily to find an af- 
firmative answer to this question : ''Are not my ways 
equal?" 

Once more : The child is born and schooled — 
educated, as we say — more or less by all through 
which he has passed in these impressionable years 
of youth. And now the time comes for sailing 
out on the ocean of Enterprise. One young inan 
finds his boat ready built and ready manned and 
abundantly victualled. He has only to step aboard 
and sail off. A second casts about hither and 
thither, applying to one and another to take him 
aboard and let him scrub decks and do anything and 
almost loses heart and hope before he can get any 
kind of start in life. Things do not seem equal here 
any more than in the other stages of life to which 
our attention has been turned. 

Here we are confronted with the externals of in- 
equality more painfully than before. There are 
more people impressed by the externals of life than 
by its internals. Mental inequality does not pro- 
duce the same impression upon so many people as 
is produced by these inequalities in external things. 
'If only we could have," say men, "equality of op- 
portunity we should not care for other forms of 
inequality which men are not accountable for and 
which belong to the general order of things. But 
the competitions of life are made more fierce and 
cruel than they need be. The laws of society are 
'to him that hath shall be given.' The talk about 



II 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 213 

equality is only froth and slime on the tongues of 
politicians. Equality of opportunity does not exist." 
And so as we look into society and remember that 
society is an evolution; that it has come to be what 
it is from causes that have been created in the past, 
under the working of divine laws in man and in 
nature, again we meet the difficulty of finding an 
affirmative to the questions, *^Are not my ways 
equal? are not your ways unequal?'' 

And so we might investigate farther and where- 
ever we looked we should find the same evidences 
of inequality and of God's ways being, as they ap- 
pear to us, in Providence, unequal. So far we take 
the facts of life as they present themselves to us at 
the first glance. 

Yet, the more carefully we look into these facts 
and the longer we dwell upon them, the more 
copiously will they supply us with something sug- 
gestive of the necessity for caution in dealing with 
them. We begin to think in this way — *Xet me 
not be too rash in my affirmations. This is not 
God's perfect world. It is very far from an ideal 
condition of society. It is society disturbed by sin. 
Men have persistently transgressed God's laws. That 
changes society itself. I cannot judge of the king- 
dom of God from what I see in a society every 
member of which is under condemnation as belong- 
ing to a sinful race. So I must be careful in form- 
ing my judgments. There are modifications and 
compensations discernible even now." 

First of all : It does not do to assume that hap- 
piness and unha])piness are in the ratio of external 



214 GLAD TIDINGS 

possession or non-possession. ^'Some are and must 
be greater than the rest — more rich — more wise 
— but who infers from thence that such are hap- 
pier shocks all common sense/' Alan is capable of 
a certain amount of happiness, so much, no more, 
and his happiness is an internal condition. It does 
not depend chiefly on externals. However much 
a man may have spread before him at a feast, he 
can eat and drink only so much. If he persists in 
eating and drinking more, dyspepsia, rheumatism, 
gout, and other equally delightful tenants will insist 
on occupying for a long lease his physical nature. 

There are limitations within which happiness and 
health dwell and they are very soon reached. The 
man who has enough for all the legitimate uses of 
life is not at a disadvantage. He has no real wants. 
The artificial wants of society have nothing to do 
with the physical and mental necessities of life. 
Health, intelligence, aspiration, all that is whole- 
some and good do not depend on anything artificial. 
The disposition in our days, even among Christian- 
ized people, to make too much of externals, needs 
to be studiously guarded against. When we are 
speaking of equality and inequality, we must not 
allow ourselves to assume that our ideas on these 
subjects are such as will stand examination in the 
light of the judgment-seat of Christ. We must not 
assume the ability to give a just or intelligent ver- 
dict even on this subject of equality so long as we 
confine ourselves to the mere externals of existence. 

There are some things we know from experience. 
Of these we can speak confidently. Has it not 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 215 

come to be one of the commonplaces of existence 
that ^'poverty is not always a curse and wealth is 
not always a blessing''? Any remark which has 
become all but proverbial must have underneath it 
a whole multitude of instances which give it cur- 
rency and support. When a child is born into the 
midst of the surroundings supplied by a luxurious 
home, he is at a considerable disadvantage in some 
ways. You say, He need not trouble himself about 
his future so far as it consists in the providing for 
the necessaries and the comforts of life. His father 
will bequeath to him enough to keep the wolf from 
the door. While others are casting about for a vo- 
cation or employment he can be at ease and care- 
less as to himself. 

Now as Christian men and women I ask you 
whether you really think this condition which tends 
to put to sleep the mental and moral faculties and 
powers is one of advantage? I cannot address an 
assemblage like this as if its members were pagan 
in mind and feeling. I must assume that at the 
lowest you are inquirers after God and truth. If 
I were face to face with men of paganized and not 
Christianized intelligence, to speak of internal con- 
dition and character as being of very much higher 
value than any external possessions would be like 
casting pearls before swine. It is our Lord him- 
self who tells us that men can become swinish and 
so entirely unteachable in regard to spiritual truth 
— the truth that concerns the mind and spirit. To 
those of you who have come here to worship God 
it would be nothins: short (^f iti^ult to assume that 



ai6 GLAD TIDINGS 

you had no ability of appreciating the higher value 
of internal character over external possessions and 
that the value of one depends on the other. I say, 
then, that that condition in life most favorable to 
the development of mental and moral character, in 
which consists the robustness of true manhood, is 
the most enviable condition and in so saying I ex- 
pect to carry your assent. 

Now if some of these comfortable conditions are 
not as favorable to the putting forth of energy and 
the developing of strength of character as are other 
less coveted conditions, immediately the question of 
equality becomes a little harder to answer. 

There is no possibility of getting light on any 
theme so long as we keep to mere surface work. 
God has so ordered things that the man who will 
not use his intellect, his moral sense, his imagina- 
tion, and put his heart into it, must remain in fog 
and mystery. The question whether God's ways 
with men are equal is an exceedingly difficult one 
to answer. All the facts seem to say. No. All our 
prejudices seem on the negative side. But if God's 
ways are not equal, are they so unequal as they 
seem to be? 

The more we investigate the facts of life, the less 
disposed are we to say that all inequalities are of 
the nature of injustice. Often and often the rich 
man's son becomes indolent and inefifective, a mere 
lazy loafer on life's highway, through want of that 
stimulus which comes naturally to the son of the 
poor man, who by and by passes him in the race 
and attains to usefulness and influence while the 



THn INEQUALITIES OF LIFE 217 

rich man's son is consuming his substance, if not 
in riotous living yet in useless and purposeless and 
frivolous living. In the martial code of Japan it 
is greater honor to die in battle than to survive a 
conflict. The names of the living members of the 
rank and file are unknov^n ; the names of those who 
die on the field of action are posted on the walls 
of the imperial palace. It is there announced that 
they gave their lives for their mikado. 

If we are to judge of equality and inequality we 
must get into the region oi character — intellectual 
character, moral character, temperamental character. 
No intelligent opinion can be formed, so long as 
we keep to outsides. We have not to dig very 
deeply below the surface before we come to the 
judgment that the ways of the Lord in providence 
are not as unequal as at first they seem to be. 

It would be interesting to investigate that region 
more thoroughly, if we dared trespass upon your 
time. We must leave it for another remark bearing 
upon the answer we shall give to the question, 
*'Are not my ways equal?" It becomes us to 
remember ever the words: "To whomsoever much 
is given, of him shall much be required : and to 
whom they commit much, of him will they ask 
the more.'' '*That servant who knew his lord's will, 
and made not ready, nor did according to his will, 
shall be beaten with many stripes ; but he that knew 
not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be 
beaten with few stripes." These are words not only 
full of warning, but full of light. There are people 
in this world who have started in the race of life 



i2iB GLAD TIDINGS 

handicapped from the very first. They have been 
badly born, badly nurtured, badly circumstanced. 
The environment of their life has been anything 
but favorable. 

Shall God require from these what in justice he 
must require from many of ourselves? By no 
means. It were injustice — cruelty indeed! And 
so we read : ^'There are last who shall be first, and 
there are first who shall be last!" ''Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right?'' asked the grand old 
patriarch and we all, in our spirit, feel that, when 
that eternal righteousness is revealed, the aspect of 
Providence will not look as it looks now. Men are 
to be found who boldly charge the Creator and 
Ruler of men with unrighteousness. And there are 
times when every one of us is inclined that way. 
Think you that the Eternal One will consent to re- 
main forever under such a suspicion? It cannot be. 
Not only must men be brought to believe in the 
mercy of God, but in his righteousness too; that he 
suffers no wrong to continue unrebuked and un- 
redressed forever. We see not now the righteous- 
ness of God. We believe it but we do not see it. 
Depend upon it that in the future we shall see it, 
that it will be made manifest, that the meaning and 
the mercy of the inequalities of our lives will be 
shown, that no unjust man will permanently escape 
the consequences of his injustice, that these lives 
that have not seemed to be worth living will be 
shown to have been in the keeping of him who does 
not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking 
flax. 



THE INEQUALITIES OF LIFE . 219 

Evolution talks of the survival of the fittest; but 
the fittest to survive in a very bad state of society 
may not be the purest and best. Sometimes the suc- 
cessful men of this world are successful because 
they can adapt themselves to evil conditions, while 
the less successful have stood sternly in resistance 
to the evil state of things. The fittest have sur- 
vived, not the best. The gospel is needed to com- 
plete creation. In the march of the myriads over 
this earth's chequered history, some are trodden un- 
der foot, lost out from the ranks; but then it does 
not seem so cruel when we remember him who has 
told us that "The Son of man came to seek and to 
save that which was lost.'' 

When we recall how this Jesus Christ put him- 
self on the side of all in his day who were at a dis- 
advantage — the publicans and sinners, the despised 
little children whose paganized parents often hated 
them for being born, the very women, tempted 
and wronged by cruel men and then flung out of 
respectable society as refuse on the streets, how he 
welcomed to God's mercy the foreigner, whom the 
Jew hated, how he even struck up a friendship and 
fellowship with the thief on the cross, how he chose 
the malefactor's gibbet that he might redeem it from 
disgrace and make it the sign of a nobility such as 
the world had seldom if ever seen — when we re- 
call these facts we feel sure that God himself is 
very strongly on the side of all who in this world 
have suffered disadvantage and loss through no 
fault of their own. We cannot see now that the 
ways of the Lord are equal. But we feel a kind 



320 GLAD TIDINGS 

of certainty that the disadvantage, the want of op- 
portunity, the sore trials and difficuhies, the tempta- 
tions so terrible, which have come to multitudes in 
this world through no fault of their own, shall not 
forever be reckoned against them. The gospel of 
Jesus Christ is a gospel for all. But it is specially 
a gospel for the weary and heavy laden, for the man 
who has been badly born, for the man w^ho has been 
handicapped in the race of life, for the man whose 
chance has been of the poorest. To-day, as ever, 
in Boston as in Jerusalem, Dives selfishly feasts 
while Lazarus lies at his gate full of sores, poor, 
sick, and helpless. But that inequality cannot last. 
If it did the divine righteousness could not be vin- 
dicated. There is a future, and it is not far off. 
There Lazarus gets his chance and Dives learns the 
lesson he refused to learn here and now. 

Let us urge upon ourselves more serious thought, 
those of us who have had so many opportunities, 
so many privileges, so many advantages — specially 
those of us who are the spoilt children in God's 
household. Let us ask ourselves whether we are 
using what God allows us to have in such a way as 
to make it evident that we are responsible beings, 
children of our Father in heaven, 'Svho maketh his 
sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth 
rain on the just and the unjust." There must come 
a time when God's great question shall be answered 
with the fulness of a positive and everlasting, Yes! 
"Is not my way equal? are not your ways unequal?'' 
saith the Lord. 



THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 



My soul thirst eth for God, for the living God: when 
shall I come and appear before God? — Ps. 
42: 2. 



XVI 

THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 

There is nothing which to an inteUigent and 
thoughtful mind would furnish ampler evidence of 
the inspiration of our sacred books than a profound 
study of our own human nature. Those parts of the 
Bible which deal with the internal life of man have 
an ability of recognizing man just as he is beyond 
any other literature with which we are acquainted. 

I have often said that the amazing knowledge of 
human nature in its most hidden depths which the 
Bible manifests, is in itself sufficient evidence that 
the men through whom the Bible came to us were 
under the special guidance of a higher inspiration 
than was common to men. These Scriptures help 
us to understand our own nature more thoroughly 
than any other literature with which we are 
acquainted. 

Take the one subject of discontent. It is uni- 
versal. What does it mean? Why is it that, put 
men where you will, in affluent or stingy circum- 
stances, that contented mind which, we are told, is 
a continual feast, is unattainable? It is attainable 
in imagination; but only there. We think, ''Tf 
only I could have so-and-so — or be so-and-so — 



224 GLAD TIDINGS 

I would ask no more!'' We don't know ourselves. 
If only we would look into the lives of those who 
have what we want and are what we think it would 
be so agreeable to us to be, we should find that the 
same discontent is there, only the appetite is keener. 
Imagination is a great artist. She can paint the 
most attractive and bewitching pictures. She can 
lure us on by her prophetic representations of a fu- 
ture in which the atmosphere is always a kind of 
Indian summer. Equinoctial storms are past. The 
flies and mosquitoes are all gone. Everything ex- 
ternal is most exquisitely adapted to yield comfort 
and satisfaction. But w^hen the man gets there, he 
finds that fact and prophecy do not accord. The 
new conditions soon lose their newness and the old 
discontent is as real as ever it was. Why is it? 

The answer is that no externals can ever satisfy 
a human spirit. It was never made to be satisfied 
with anything that money can buy. The nature of 
man is such that it contains in itself the secret of 
its divine origin. ''My soul thirsteth for God, for 
the living God: when shall I come and appear be- 
fore God? My tears have been my food day and 
night, while they continually say unto me, Where 
is thy God?" To some, such language is rhapsody, 
scarcely intelligible. It is not the common language 
of common human nature. But is it not illuminat- 
ing? Does it not start inquiry as to the meaning 
of the universality of the discontent we find in hu- 
man nature? 

The meaning of it, that is what we need to inquire 
into before we can say anything very intelligent 



THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 225 

about it. Always in our sacred books it is assumed 
that this discontent of which we are all con- 
scious is a thirst for the divine. It is natural there- 
fore; not something to be repressed, but guided. 
Man's life is not intended to be a peaceful pond in 
a sheltered wood, covered with the sluggish scum 
of inactivity. Rather is it intended to be a river, 
rising in the silences of the high mountains and 
flowing on, with ever-deepening volume, until it 
finds the Eternal Ocean from which it originally 
was drawn. 

Growth, movement, not stagnation, is the law of 
the inner life. Evolution, development — these are 
the modern philosophical terms for this inner or- 
der of our invisible nature. *'I shall be satisfied,'' 
said the old Hebrew seer. When? *'When I awake 
in thy likeness." Fie never expected to be satisfied 
until then. He had learned the secret, that satisfac- 
tion would come when God and man were so ad- 
justed to each other that man's life was an 
immediate and natural response to the life of Deity. 

We need not, then, be troubled about our own 
discontent, this feeling of unsettledness and rest- 
lessness within us. It means spiritual aspiration. 
It means upwardness and onwardness of life. It 
is the pull of the divine nature on our own. It 
means ''that this is not our rest." It means that we 
are strangers and pilgrims. It means that our pres- 
ent state of life is not final, that it is preparatory 
and provisional, that all our best life is in the fu- 
ture, that our golden age is not in the past and that 
it is not in the present. There is no understanding 



226 GLAD TIDINGS 

the discontent and dissatisfaction we find within 
ourselves, until we get the perception that it is 
the pull of the divine upon our spirits. There 
is a law of gravitation for souls, as well as for 
bodies. The pull of the divine upon our spirits is 
indicated by an inward discontent which nothing 
can appease but that which causes it. 

And that the children who are here may under- 
stand what we mean, allow me just to recall a story 
of the days of the Civil War. In those days when the 
President's soul was weary, a little boy playing out- 
side the White House became involved with another 
little boy and they fought madly. He came in with 
his face bleeding and his body aching and cried out : 
*'I want my father!'' Well, there was the secre- 
tary of the treasury. Suppose Secretary Chase had 
said : **I know where the greatest master of finance 
this age has produced is." ''But I want my 
father!" the boy would say. And another in that 
cabinet might have said: *'I can get for you the 
commander-in-chief of the armies and navies of 
the United States." ''Oh, but I want my father!" 
And so, if the mightiest diplomatist in foreign af- 
fairs, or the greatest lawyer in the country had been 
offered him, the boy still would have cried: "But 
I want my father !" That is the cry of the human 
soul, when it is in trouble. That is the meaning of 
the unappeasable discontent of the human heart. 
That is why no externals can ever be to any of us 
more than the merest temporary palliative. 

The first necessity for living a wise and profitable 
life is the understanding of our own nature. Until 



THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 227 

we know ourselves and our real wants, our lives will 
be a series of blundering incapacities and indirec- 
tions. Without knowing it, we shall be making mis- 
takes all the time. Instead of feeding our deepest 
nature on ''bread of life," we shall be feeding it on 
stones. We must know ourselves and what the un- 
appeasable cravings of our nature mean, before we 
can get steadiness and right direction into our lives. 
''My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: 
when shall I come and appear before God?" That 
man had discovered himself. He knew himself. 
And that is one of the most momentous uses of an 
intelligent Church life, to make us know ourselves. 
We may know all the geography of the external 
world and yet be as blind as bats to the geography 
of our own inner life. 

From this lack of accurate acquaintance with our 
own inner life comes those types of life which pro- 
claim to the world around them, in that unspoken 
speech which is most persuasive, the speech of daily 
living, that there is nothing great in man, nothing 
divine. He is nothing better than a developed ba- 
boon and the present is his all, his heaven and his 
hell, his highest good and his lowest misery. The 
most real thing in any of us is the thirst of the soul, 
that unappeasable discontent which shows itself in 
such a bewildering multitude of human efforts to 
get something we have not already got. 

For, to a thoughtful, devout, penetrating intel- 
ligence one of the most saddening things in life is 
its blundering heedlessness, its non-recognition of 
its deepest needs. The writer of the book of Eccle- 



228 GLAD TIDINGS 

siastes has these discouraging words: '*In much 
wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth 
knowledge increaseth sorrow/' These words seem 
to be pessimistic. And yet, are they not true to fact ? 

The more you know of human nature, the more 
contempt you have for it and the more reverence. 
The thirst after the divine which is wrought into 
its very texture, that creates reverence; and the in- 
curable frivolousness and stupidity with which so 
many lives are lived, that creates contempt. There 
are lives which are wicked, lives which are vicious, 
lives which seem even to have sunk to that unre- 
penting level which the Bible calls demoniac. These 
are definite types. We understand them. They 
create aversion. But there are other lives not so 
definitely classable, with no right direction in them, 
which do not create aversion. On the outside they 
may be even artistic. They have a certain surface 
impressiveness about them. But they never seem 
to recognize the divine in human nature. Their one 
perplexing and seemingly irremovable characteris- 
tic is their shallowness. Their conduct of them- 
selves never suggests that our human nature has 
unexplorable depths in it. If man is to be measured 
by his soul, as Dr. Watts puts it, what are we to 
think of lives which never suggest soul? "I must 
be measured by my soul, the mind 's the standard of 
the man." 

There is no denying that in men there is a dis- 
content which is persistent. And it is in every man. 
What does it mean? St. Augustine, the great 
Church father knew, and his undying words have 



THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 229 

come into renewed expression in every generation: 
''O God, thou hast made us for thyself and our 
hearts are restless till they rest in thee." Augustine 
himself had tried to appease his discontent in las- 
civious ways. But he had never succeeded. That 
famous book, his Confessions, gives us the outer 
and inner history of the man. Its value consists 
in its candor. There are multitudes of lives not 
openly vicious. But they have no rest in them. 
They may be nominally Christian lives, but what- 
ever they may have received from Christ, they have 
not received rest. ''Come unto me . . . and ye shall 
find rest to your souls." That they have not re- 
ceived. 

In the world's history there seem never to have 
been such restless days as our own. What multi- 
tudes of travelling people one meets who seem to 
have no real home, no abiding-place. They are the 
Arabs of our modern civilization, never in one place 
for long, personally acquainted with all the ships 
that cross the ocean and all the railroads that cross 
the plains. What are they seeking? They positively 
do not know. Have you never remarked upon the 
suggestiveness of that opening passage in the book 
of Job : ''Now it came to pass on the day when the 
sons of God came to present themselves before Je- 
hovah that Satan [the Adversary of Man] also 
came among them. And Jehovah said unto Satan, 
Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered Je- 
hovah, and said, From going to and fro in the 
earth, and from walking up 'AUi\ down in it." He 
had no home. One of his ^-rcat ciiaracteristics was 



Ji30 GLAD TIDINGS 

his restlessness. The same question would bring the 
same answer from a multitude of people to whom 
we might put it in our days. 

Men are becoming restless and homeless. The dis- 
content in them is getting the better of them. They 
have no high purpose in life. They have no definite 
end. There is nothing so demoralizing as constant 
travel among strange peoples. It breaks up the home 
feeling. It disorganizes all our religious habits. It 
deepens our discontent. People who do not keep a 
firm rein on themselves, and especially young peo- 
ple at an impressible age, are influenced most pow- 
erfully by the surface laxities rather than the deep 
reverences of the people among whom they move. 
A continental Sabbath seems to them a freer and 
gayer day than an Anglo-Saxon Sabbath and they 
are ready to vote for it. They see the surface of 
things only and not the home life underneath. They 
live in hotels. They do not penetrate those quiet 
homes of which Germany, for instance, has so many. 

Underneath all this outside restlessness character- 
istic of our time and productive of it, is that divine 
discontent which needs to be appeased by that bread 
of life to which our Lord referred. But these of 
whom I speak do not understand the discontent 
which is in them. Christian disciples, who have 
been in the school of Christ, ought to understand 
what it means, but even they do not. 

We have learnt many things from our great 
Teacher and Lord, truths addressed to the under- 
standing, truths as to sin and its destructive quality, 
truths as to the continuance of human life beyond 



THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 231 

the grave ; but I fear many of us Christians have not 
learned the secret of personal communion with a 
Hving Christ; and so we have not learned to rest 
in him and wait patiently his inward work, which 
goes on silently and individually in our nature. We 
are familiar with his words : ''Come unto me all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you 
rest;'' but what they mean we do not know ex- 
perimentally. 

The life of the Church is threatened in our day 
not by anything which can be done to it from with- 
out. The worst that can be done has been done. 
The destructives among the critics have got about 
to the end of their rope. In our day the life of the 
Church is threatened from within. So many of its 
members are unacquainted with the sacred depths 
of their own nature. They are trying to appease 
that divine discontent which the Spirit of God has 
created within them in ways which show how al- 
together ignorant they are of what it means. The 
great characteristic truths of Christianity are never 
safely rooted within us so as to be ineradicable, un- 
til they are known experimentally, until they have 
been appropriated as bread is appropriated by a 
hungry man, or water by a man parched with thirst. 

Let me ask if in each of us here ])resent tliere is 
a sympathetic response to the simple and beautiful 
words of that exquisite hymn : 

"I came to Jesus as I was, 

Weary and worn and sad; 
I found in Him a resting place, 

And He has made me glad." 



232 GLAD TIDINGS 

If those words represent our own experience, then 
the discontent within us will not be a gnawing dis- 
content — rather it will be of the nature of a healthy 
appetite. Yes, it will be to us a sign of the ever- 
active Spirit of God in the spirit of man. And we 
shall be delivered from assuming that our discontent 
of soul can ever be met by accumulations of money- 
wealth, or by seeing anything or hearing anything. 
*'For the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear 
wnth hearing/' In a mind adjusted to the divine 
order of things, discontent is of the nature of as- 
piration. It is homesickness. It is the cry of the 
soul in the apostle's language : ^^Show us the Father, 
and it sufficeth us." That is the real meaning of it. 

But where there is no filial piety, no right atti- 
tude of the soul to God, discontent is a gnawing 
hunger and the poor ignorant creature thinks that 
if only he could be rich, or famous, or in some way 
influential, or be able to do this or that, the dis- 
content would cease. He would be happy. 

No delusion can be greater. The facts of life 
deny it. Appetite grows with what it feeds on. As 
a matter of fact, discontent gnaws most bitterly in 
men and women who, to the outsider looking on, 
ought to be most grateful and happy. 

''My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: 
when shall I come and appear before God?" — 
**Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are 
restless until we rest in thee." 



THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 



But the Pharisees went out, and took counsel against 
him, hozv they might destroy him. And Jesus 
perceiving it withdrezv from thence. — Matt. 
12: 14, 15. 



I 



XVII 
THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 

When great truths are set before us in biograph- 
ical expression they take hold of the imagination 
more strongly. The human life of Jesus of Naz- 
areth cannot be studied too minutely. Its smallest 
details throb with meaning. There is as much sig- 
nificancy in his withdrawal from a place as in his 
abode there. 

To us who can see into the facts recorded in New 
Testament Writ more profoundly than the very peo- 
ple concerned in them, the withdrawal of Jesus is 
a pathetic and serious business. It means to us so 
much more than it meant to them. The personality 
of Jesus is to us so much greater than it was to these 
people who were plotting to destroy him. We 
judge of him in the light which has poured down 
the centuries. They judged of him simply as a dis- 
turbing element in their religious and social life. 
The withdrawal of Jesus must therefore have for 
us more significance than it had for them. It is a 
pictured truth. And all pictured truth has a double 
value — it has value for the imagination and for the 
intelligence. 

On several occasions we read that Jesus with- 
drew himself, once because the people mobbed him, 



836 GLAD TIDINGS 

once because he was so wearied in body and mind 
that it was necessary he should rest himself, as he 
seems to have done by retirement into some quietude 
which he filled with prayer. For there is nothing 
so restful to jaded nerves as solitary prayer. On 
the occasion before us he withdrew himself in self- 
defence. They were plotting to destroy him. The 
time had not yet come for that. Eventually it came. 
Through resurrection and ascension he withdrew 
himself and then everything in the nation went to 
pieces. Historians who look on the surface only 
and not into the spiritual depths of human charac- 
ter may refuse to recognize any connection between 
the crucifixion of Jesus and the national break-up; 
but men whose business it is to trace the connection 
between the failure in character and the failure in 
life, know that religious and moral deterioration 
has always been followed by civil and political dis- 
turbances of the most serious kind. 

And this leads to the truth which I am specially 
desirous to have you recognize : That to attack re- 
ligion is not to destroy religion, but to attack and 
disorganize everything else. Man is incurably reli- 
gious, as some great writer has said. And the 
reason of it is that he was so constituted. The God 
who first gave him of his own life could not do that 
without leaving his sign-manual in his nature. 
Whatever interpretation we put upon the words: 
"Made in his image, after his likeness,'' this must 
be admitted, that the impression of the divine was 
so deeply made in man's nature as to continue to 
hold itself in evidence. 



THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 237 

That statement may seem to demand justification. 
The evidence for a religious sense in many men 
seems so slight as to be almost worthless. There is, 
however, a vast difference to be recognized be- 
tween a merely existent religious sense and a con- 
trolling religious sense. Faculties that are cultivated 
are pronouncedly more in evidence than neg- 
lected faculties. Darwin tells us that in early life 
he had a ready response in his nature to music and 
art, but that through neglect of cultivation he 
totally lost them. The religiousness of our nature 
needs cultivation as much as the mathematical in- 
tellectuality of our nature. Religion denied its 
natural expression will withdraw itself into the in- 
ner regions of man's nature and abide there as 
a feeling, an aspiration, a mysterious whisper in a 
haunted chamber, or even as a discontent, or as a 
fear: ^^A.n aching void which nought on earth can 
fill." 

You recall that in the Jewish temple there was 
a holy of holies, a curtained sanctuary, dedicated 
to silence and mystery into which only once a year 
the high priest entered. And in every man's na- 
ture there seems to be a kind of holy of holies, into 
which religion's self may retire and in unspeaking 
silence seem to be extinguished. 

I very much question whether in any man the 
extinction of that God-given light is ever complete. 
There have been so many signs of its awakening 
in the most hardened and vicious, that he would be 
a bold man who should dogmatically affirm the pos- 
sibility of its total extinction. But as Jesus with- 



238 GLAD TIDINGS 

drew himself from the men who were platting to 
destroy him, so this religious sense in man may- 
withdraw itself from those departments of his life 
where the common eye can recognize it and live its 
hermit life in the darkened recesses of a man's own 
mysterious personality. 

When that is the case, what will happen to the 
man's life ? It will lack high purpose. It will lack 
sufficiently intelligent guidance. It will lack that 
noble inspiration without which life is almost cer- 
tian to become a drudgery of some sort — the 
grumbling service of some dire necessity or cruel 
fate. There is a most striking difference as to the 
temper in which life is lived by different men. 
Some men convey to you the impression that they 
are perpetual slaves. They do what they do be- 
cause they must. Life is to them little better than 
a treadmill in a prison — a very elegant and won- 
derful prison, it is true, but a prison. Other men 
have about them an atmosphere which is radiated 
from a personality that seems to be perpetually 
drinking its fill from some central sun whose beams 
are life-giving. Life does not seem to be a task, but 
an enjoyment, or if a service, a service which is 
perfect freedom. 

The impression this second man gives is not of 
a slave on a plantation from which he cannot es- 
cape, but of a son in a home. And so we read that 
Christ gave men powder to become (what they were 
designed to be) sons of God. Christianity, rightly 
and amply apprehended, is deliverance from slav- 
ery, deliverance from that bondage of the spirit in 



THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 239 

which Saul of Tarsus found himself. It is like a 
man who has been a servant employed by the firm 
being taken into partnership, which means coopera- 
torship, directorship, guidance, ownership. An ir- 
religious man regards himself as a creature of 
necessity, not as one associated with the business in 
hand and having a personal interest in it. If re- 
ligion does not lift us into a feeling of sonship to- 
wards God, it fails to do for us what it was designed 
to do. 

That which is true of us individually, is true of 
us collectively — true of us in regard to our do- 
mestic, social, civic, political life. In respect of 
these, to attack religion is not to destroy religion. 
It withdraws itself into the silent profundities of 
our nature, as I have already suggested. But when 
it withdraws, everything else becomes disorganized, 
domestic life, social life, civic life, political life. It 
is as if the sun should set and never rise again. He 
would go to shine on other worlds; but our world 
would immediately become something else than it 
is. The vegetable kingdom would be disorganized. 
The animal kingdom would fail and faint and die 
because of the non-productiveness of the vegetable 
kingdom, and the whole earth would return to chaos 
and old night 

I don't know how many of you have read Jane 
Austen's Mansfield Park, It is worth reading. 
Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay have ranked 
this English lady, in the ability of character-draw- 
ing, next to Shakespeare himself. Only she keeps 
within the somewhat limited area of ordinary Eng- 



240 GLAD TIDINGS 

lish domestic life. It is said that her wonderfully 
accurate command of choice and expressive English 
words so fascinated John Henry Newman, himself 
generally acknowledged as among the masters of 
English prose, that he used to read this volume, 
Mansfield Park, every year, for the sake of keep- 
ing his ear attuned to the rhythm and music of the 
language he had to employ. 

In this book of which I speak, the griefs and sor- 
rows and sins of the family at Mansfield Park are 
all traced to the grievous mismanagement of the 
children. They had been instructed theoretically in 
their religion but never required to bring it into 
daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance 
and accomplishments, had had no useful influence 
that way. The understanding had been cultivated. 
Manners had been strictly enforced. But the dis- 
position, the inclinations, and tempers had not been 
educated. Pride had been allowed. Pride of 
ancestry and pride of place; but they had 
never been schooled in self-denial and humility. 
When one headstrong daughter brings disgrace 
on the whole family and a second and younger 
daughter acts the fool, the fine old man begins to 
examine into causes and arrives at the conviction 
that his method of education of his children had 
been radically wrong. 

Some of you may have looked into society around 
you with sufficient keenness of vision to have dis- 
covered that when religion retires into the secret 
recesses of the heart, changes begin to take place 
in the relation of the family to itself and to its 



THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 241 

neighbors and friends. A new moral atmosphere 
is superinduced. Life begins to lose its seriousness 
and takes on more and more the aspect of a stage 
play. Religion is not killed. It is driven inward. 
It no longer expresses itself. It gradually dies (as 
near as anything so vital can die) for want of ade- 
quate expression. The children from such homes are 
sent out into society entirely unfitted tO' meet temp- 
tations — such temptations as we all know of. 
They have no principles. The domestic life through 
which ought to have come to them airs from heaven 
has become disorganized and conveys to them only 
poisonous malarias. 

It is so everywhere. To attack religion or to 
cease to respect and cultivate it is not to destroy 
religion, but to disorganize everything else. It is 
like shutting out fresh air from your house. You 
don't destroy the fresh air. It remains. But you 
deteriorate the quality of your own blood. An un- 
seen, unperceived, subtle poison gradually gets it- 
self into every vein and artery of the body. 

Not alone to personal life, but to all life, life in 
all its collective units, civic, social, and political, the 
same truth applies. Shut out religious principle, and 
some form of demoralization immediately begins. 
The separation of the organized church from the 
state may be an economical necessity; but the 
shutting out of religion is quite another matter. Re- 
ligion — taking the word according to the deriva- 
tion of it — is that which binds a human spirit to 
God. Every man living is under moral obligation 
to serve God, because his life is given him and 



242 



GLAD TIDINGS 



everything that contributes to its comfort and sus- 
tenance is given. He cannot create a sun or an at- 
mosphere, or make the cHmate favorable to the 
growing of his food. Nine-tenths of all we have 
is given us. The intelligence that fails to recognize 
its moral obligation Godwards must be blinded. 

The word God stands for a divine order for hu- 
man life. God is a God of order and not of con- 
fusion. To conform ourselves to that divine order 
is to be righteous. It is to be wise and good. There 
is a domestic order which is best. There is a civil 
order which is best. There is a political order which 
is best. And, as men say, the best is good enough. 
But nothing can be best which leaves out the sense 
of Godward obligation. There are numbers of hon- 
est, good men who are not fitted to be in places of 
trust and responsibility. They lack intellectual ca- 
pacity to grasp things in their relations to one an- 
other. They are short-sighted. They do not see 
far enough ahead. But of one thing we may be sure, 
that while there are some honest, good men who 
are not qualified for places of public trust, no man 
who does not feel himself responsible to God for 
the way in which he lives his life and discharges 
his duty is fitted, whatever his intellectual capacity. 
There is one great practical word of our Lord's 
which none of us have yet sufficiently learned: 
"Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; 
and all these things shall be added unto you." 

Men have not learned to put that first which is 
first, and until they have they must suffer countless 
ills which are of their own invention and not in the 



THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS 343 

natural order of things. That which we need our- 
selves to learn more perfectly and to teach others 
(for if through his own disciples our Lord cannot 
teach others, through whom can he teach them?) is 
this, that religion is not a mere fringe added to the 
garment of life; that it is not a mere ornament, 
pretty but practically useless ; but that, as Browning 
puts it, it is everything or nothing. It is what 
the spirit in man is to this outer body, this "body 
of our humiliation," as Paul styles it. It is the 
vitalizing principle. When the spirit of man leaves 
the body, the spirit is not destroyed. It recognizes 
itself immediately as in a spirit-world which at once 
becomes objective to it as this world is to our 
physical sight. The spirit is not destroyed. It finds 
other and higher embodiment according to its neces- 
sities, but the body itself immediately becomes dis- 
organized. It is no longer capable of any uses and 
we are compelled to say: "Bury my dead out of 
my sight." 

And so, I repeat, and this is the thought for which 
I would get clear and distinct recognition, that to 
attack religion is not to destroy religion, but it is to 
attack and disorganize everything else — personal 
life, domestic life, civil life, political life. It is to 
take the regenerating element out of them all and 
thus inevitably they become corrupt. 



LAW AND GRACE 



Por sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye 
are not under law, hut under grace. — Rom, 
6: 14, 



II 



XVIII' 
LAW AND GRACE 

The word "grace" we got from the French. The 
French got it from the Old Romans. The Greek 
form of the word is Xapts, connected with Xat))<u, 
I rejoice. So that the word in its etymology 
means that which gives joy and pleasure, that which 
is delightful 

Hence at a very early period of its career as a 
word, it was applied to that which was beautiful. 
Beauty is delightful. A beautiful movement of the 
body is graceful. If a dress is beautiful in its fabric 
and if it fits beautifully, it is graceful. 

But there is beauty of character, beauty of moral 
feeling and acting, and this beauty is fitted to give 
delight and joy. Hence Greeks, Latins, French, and 
English called it grace. Kindness and loving-kind- 
ness is grace. 

There is still another application of the word, as 
when we say grace before meals. The very same 
word stands for gratitude. Gratitude is graceful. 
It is grace. Gratitude is a grace delightful to God. 

' Under the caption of this sermon, Dr. Thomas wrote, "Sug- 
gestion from Jowett." How th-e suggestion came, whether by 
personal conversation or by reading, the editor is not able to 
say. It would seem that Dr. Thomas would wish to have this 
credit published with the sermon. 



248 GLAD TIDINGS 

Its want indicates a greedy character, low and un- 
worthy. 

Let us remember the origin and history of the 
word as we think of the grace of which our apostle 
speaks so delightfully (Rom. 6: 14), *'For sin shall 
not have dominion over you: for ye are not under 
law, but under grace/' 

The great monosyllables of the Bible ought 
never to escape our attention. They are law, grace, 
faith, love, hope. They remind us of the great 
monosyllables of nature — sun, moon, star, earth, 
sky. It seems almost as if the smaller the word is, 
the more it contains. Law — we can discourse for- 
ever on its persistency and universality. Grace — 
the New Testament is full of it, and, if we search 
intelligently, we shall find the Old Testament, from 
end to end, furnishes us with illustrations of its en- 
compassing presence over the life of man and in 
the Providence of God. 

It has been customary with the old Puritan di- 
vines, who seem to have known more of religion 
experimentally than we do, to say that the Old Tes- 
tament illustrates the supremacy of law and the 
New Testament of grace. Sinai stands for one and 
Calvary for the other. In these days our way of 
stating things is different, but we must not depre- 
ciate the past. It is the foundation on which the 
present is built. 

We seem to be of opinion that the past was weak 
and feeble compared with the present, that our cen- 
tury is the great achieving century and we are the 
people for whose appearance the sun and moon and 



LAW AND GRACE 249 

stars have been waiting. When we look at our sky- 
scrapers, does it not seem the age of Babel, not of 
Pentecost with its tongues of fire? If we search 
into history more diligently than is the custom of 
most of us, we shall find that mechanical achieve- 
ment is the phrase which, more than any other, ex- 
presses our only superiority. Although when we 
think of the pyramids of Egypt, of the Coliseum at 
Rome and the Parthenon at Athens and other won- 
ders, we hesitate to claim very great superiority 
even in the realm of mechanical achievements. We 
say that the Suez canal was completed under the 
direction of Lesseps, but it was originally projected 
by Pharaoh Necho, who hoped to bind the sea of 
the rising, with the sea of the setting, sun. The 
Mont Cenis tunnel, one of the most notable 
achievements of modern times, was an idea work- 
ing in the brain of Hannibal, 200 b. c. Leading his 
legions to the foot of the Alps, he deliberated 
whether it would be better to dig under them or 
climb over them. The czar of Russia congratu- 
lates himself on the completion of the Siberian rail- 
way; but Alexander the Great, in his campaigns of 
universal conquest, planned a highway identical 
with it. The men of the past had ideas as great 
as ours. In all ages there have been great men with 
great ideas throbbing in their brains, so that no wise 
man will despise the past. Men change, but human- 
ity remains the same. Jesus Christ is the same yes- 
terday as to-day. If we are not under the law, but 
under grace to-day, we may be sure that men have 
been in a similar relation to the divine from the 



250 GLAD TIDINGS 

time of the beautiful legend of Eden till this year 
of our Lord opened upon us. 

Why, then, does our apostle emphasize the pre- 
eminence of grace? Why does he say, '*Ye are not 
under law"? Are we not under law? Is not law 
everywhere? Has it not been the great effort of 
the science of our age to bring us back into the rec- 
ognition that man lives by law and walks by law 
and talks by law and does everything by law ? Has 
not the theologian called our attention again and 
yet again to the fact that sin is lawlessness? No 
heresy in our time could be more practically ap- 
palling in its results than to weaken respect for the 
universality and majesty of law. 

This passage I have read shows us how misled 
people are sure to be when they take single verses 
of Scripture to support a position they wish to main- 
tain. When you have a letter from a friend, if you 
do not read the whole of it the sense of some par- 
ticular paragraph may be utterly perverted, and 
there is nothing which the Bible may not be made 
to teach if its parts are treated as wholes. Sectari- 
anism arises out of this. The religious gullibility 
of people whom we had credited with intelligence 
is perplexing and amazing. This apostle never sets 
law and grace in antagonism. He puts law in its 
rightful place when he says: ^'The law is become 
our tutor to bring us unto Christ.'' It had a work 
to do — but it was a work of direction, enlighten- 
ment, and condemnation. It was a work of judg- 
ment, not salvation. It had the conscience on its 
side. But it could not pardon sin and it could not 



LAW AND GRACE 251 

save the sinner, **For the grace of God hath ap- 
peared, bringing salvation." ''By grace have ye 
been saved." "Being justified freely by his grace." 
''Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are 
not under the law, but under grace." 

I want that we should understand and appreci- 
ate this great spacious word grace. It is an old 
term which has suffered neglect. And it is an im- 
mense pity that so fruitful a word should be put 
away among the antiquities of speech. Because, 
when we come upon a mighty passage like this : "In 
whom we have our redemption through his blood, 
the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the 
riches of his grace, which he made to abound to- 
ward us in all wisdom and prudence," we are non- 
plussed. We do not catch the meaning. We do not 
appreciate how rich in experience and how fervid in 
feeling such language is. Grace — why clearly it in- 
cludes "thought and purpose and good-will and 
love." But if we think of it only, as do too many, as 
"a pleasing sentiment, a sofa disposition, a welcome 
feeling of cosy favor entertained toward us by God," 
we depreciate the word. We make it effeminate. We 
miss the heart of it. We do not feel its energy. 
But if it includes these elements which I have already 
named — "thought, purpose, good-will, love," it 
must be one of the strongest words in Scripture. 

Perhaps we have been misled as to its virility by 
the words "graceful" and "gracious," which are so 
often on our tongues. We speak of a woman as 
graceful, seldom of a man. We refer to speech as 
gracious, but it does not necessarily carry in it the 



252 GLAD TIDINGS 

idea of forceful. Hence, when we speak of the 
grace of God, does it convey to us the secret energy 
of a fortified will? Scarcely. And yet, if we use 
it as does our apostle, it is that in God which is 
unconquerable, which cannot be subdued by the per- 
sistency and perversity and unrepentingness of the 
measureless sinfulness of a race like ours. I remem- 
ber in Professor Drummond's Life there is the rec- 
ord of his returning home from visiting among the 
tenements of Glasgow and he had met with such 
painful and appalling evidences of the ravages of sin 
that he was fearfully depressed and cried out : "Oh 
God, how canst thou tolerate such people as these?" 
And it is a question, a very serious question, why 
God tolerates some men, why he suffers them to 
live, why he does not withdraw^ that vital spark 
which seems only to light them to deeds of demoniac 
darkness ? 

But, as we are thus questioning, Paul comes 
along with his magnificent optimism and cries: 
* Where sin abounded, grace did abound more ex- 
ceedingly." In this optimistic passage the apostle is 
asserting a most glorious truth; that in the divine 
nature, fundamental in it, there is something per- 
sistent, unquenchable, unconquerable, which never 
despairs, to which he applies the word "grace." I 
know not to what we can compare it in nature unless 
we say it is like the atmosphere, sunlit, which is 
around us and in us, without which we could not 
live. It penetrates everywhere. If we could keep it 
out of our houses, we should die. It is life, health, 
energy, vigor. 



LAW AND GRACE 253 

Grace is the spiritual oxygen of the universe. 
We may pollute the atmosphere. We may disturb 
the natural equilibrium of the gases of which it is 
composed. But its tenuity, its ability of quietly and 
noiselessly forcing its way through every chink and 
crevice, gives it a universal competency which a 
more solid substance could not have. Similarly the 
grace of God is everywhere present. In it there is 
divine patience and universal benevolence. 

Why it is that you and I are here this morning 
in this temple consecrated to God's worship? We 
have sinned enough to deserve the death penalty. 
Gur sinfulness may not have been public and offen- 
sive. Sin has a way of hiding itself in the most 
secret places of our nature. It may be quietly work- 
ing at the very heart of our constitution. Its ex- 
istence as a spiritual disease may be manifested to 
the trained eye in flippancy; or it may be "in the 
guise of a jaunty carelessness; sometimes it issues 
as forced laughter; sometimes it is evidenced in a 
passionate recoil against religion." We see it in 
"proud living"; jn "violent and sensational pleas- 
ures"; in "proudly assumed indifference"; in the 
"anger aroused by august ideals"; in "passionate 
aversions to the teachings of evangelical religion." 
Sometimes we see signs of it in the envies that even 
Christian disciples allow themselves; in personal 
hostilities; in censoriousness ; in the mischief-mak- 
ing of uncontrolled tongues; in subtle forms of 
hatred and aloofness which we justify to ourselves. 
Is there not abounding witness that man is held in 
dark and cruel servitude by the guilt and power of sin? 



254 GLAD TIDINGS 

Supposing God had left us to develop these 
hidden dispositions to their fulness of growth — 
what then? Into what a dark hell of iniquity should 
we have sunk! But no. Secretly, silently, some 
corrective has been interpenetrating our souls. The 
grace of God, like some unseen atmosphere, has been 
entering our nature and we have had spasms of il- 
lumination, times of repentance, flashes of self- 
discovery that have been so searching that occasion- 
ally the lines of the old hymn have fitted our self- 
consciousness : 

*Talse and full of sin I am, 

Thou art full of truth and grace." 

But for the grace of God mankind ere this would 
have annihilated itself. Everywhere sin ; but, as the 
apostle puts it, everywhere grace. Law has not 
been arrested; but it has been controlled by grace. 
Law stands for duty. Grace stands for affection. 
When duty is reenforced by affection then is a man 
at his best. If we were to say that Law is the serv- 
ant of Grace, I think we should be speaking in har- 
mony with the teaching of the great intellectual 
apostle. Hence it must appear to us how unintelli- 
gent is that kind of speech which tries to set law 
and grace in antagonism. 

In the days, not long passed, when men searched 
the Scriptures for their daily mental food far be- 
yond what I fear is our habit, it was customary to 
dwell too much on single words and separate verses, 
as if they would squeeze out all the juice there was 
in every separate grape. As if a student in a dis- 
secting room should give his attention to each 



LAW AND GRACE 255 

separate part of a body and forget about the rela- 
tion of part to part and that each part was included 
in a cooperative whole and that the usefulness of 
the parts could only be seen when in its rightful 
place in the whole organism. When men put jus- 
tice and mercy in antagonism to each other and 
make Mercy plead with Justice to sheath the sword, 
then are they speaking unbiblically. When Grace 
and Law are at variance and Grace is asked to turn 
Law from its straight path of duty, then intelli- 
gence is at fault. There is not a family to be found 
in which law and grace have been in conflict but 
the children have suffered in character. It is the 
atmosphere of family life which determines what 
the children will be. Let there be grace without 
law and the children will grow up with no proper 
feeling as to the virtue of obedience. Let there be 
law without grace and the coldness of the atmos- 
phere will freeze the natural affections of child- 
hood. But let law and grace cooperate and the 
results will be generous love shown in ready obedi- 
ence. So is it everywhere. If in visiting a hospital 
you opened a door and came upon the unclothed 
skeleton of the most graceful human shape on which 
you ever set eyes, it would repel you. The law of 
the erect human figure is there ; but all the grace has 
gone. That which I want to impress is that, in the 
divine dealings with this human race, law and grace 
are cooperative. Grace is sovereign; but Law is 
prime-minister. How strange the movements of 
Divine Providence seem to us at times, I need not 
argue. 



256 GLAD TIDINGS 

What we need, to give us patience and courage 
until the intricate pattern of our Ufe is wrought into 
it, is a behef hke that of the apostles, that where 
sin aboundeth grace doth superabound. Not one of 
us knows what discipline is necessary to wean any 
life from its idols, and to open it to those sources 
of strength from which renewal must come. If we 
want to know, we must get wisdom from him who 
is made unto us wisdom as well as righteousness. 
Probably you have read that wonderful transforma- 
tion which came over the old weaver in Silas 
Marner, George Eliot's masterpiece. The old 
weaver "soured by injustice, wrongfully suspected 
of crime, eating his heart out in solitude, possessed 
by one consuming passion — love for the gold he was 
slowly accumulating, guinea by guinea, and burying 
under the floor of his cottage" — and then, on that 
night when he is robbed of his idol, his golden 
guineas, mad with despair, finding on his door- 
step a little child, beautiful, helpless, appealing, who 
becomes his savior and his sanctifier? And how? 
How did that babe save him ? Not by law, but by 
grace. By awakening in him a love stronger than 
his greed, by awakening in him a tenderness he 
never knew before, by stimulating him to lift him- 
self, by humanizing him, by evoking in him an un- 
selfishness that revolutionized his character. In that 
beautiful incident law and grace are cooperative. 

And if you search the Scriptures you will find 
that everywhere in God's dealings with men law and 
grace are co-working. Grace without law would be 
weak. Law without grace would be retribution 



LAW AND GRACE 257 

marching on to the bitter end, no redemption in it. 
There is no one force in the world that can be solely 
entrusted with the guidance of life. Grace alone 
would give us a world of spoiled children, absolutely 
good for nothing great and worthy. Law alone 
would give us a race of slaves, an Egyptian bondage 
under taskmasters. Law and grace, cooperating, 
develop all parts of human character. In our civic 
life the judge stands for law — the Christian clergy- 
man for grace. Both are God's ambassadors. 
Lawlessness and gracelessness go together. Where- 
ever you find the one you find the other. 

I fear this spacious and optimistic word grace has 
fallen into the background of our theological vo- 
cabulary because the word sin has become anti- 
quated. What do we mean by sin in our day ? One 
says it is imperfect knowledge. Another that it is 
a tendency for which we are not accountable because 
we have inherited it from the past. A third wise 
man adds a suggestion — that it is simply the sign 
of uncongenial environment. And so on, and so 
on. Paul says sin is lawlessness. It is individual. 
It is in the will. I wonder we don't perceive the 
double-distilled essence of cowardice in this attempt 
to put our own sin on our fathers and mothers, or 
on our fellow men around us — for environment 
means the conditions brought about by men and 
women like ourselves. No conviction of sin can 
ever come to men and women who are the victims 
of these half-truths which are often worse in their 
effects than whole lies. 

If sin means nothing but heredity and environ- 



258 GLAD TIDINGS 

nient, then grace means nothing and all the jubi- 
lancy St. Paul had as he thought of the grace of 
God bringing salvation, of the grace of God giving 
us good hope, of having "forgiveness of sins, accord- 
ing to the richness of his grace,'' of the grace of God 
flaming forth in the v^illing sacrifice of Calvary — 
all this goes for nothing. And many of our most 
fruitful hymns v^ill have to be revised : 

"Jesus sought me when a stranger 

Wandering from the fold of God. 
He to rescue me from danger 

Interposed His precious blood. 

"Oh, to grace how great a debtor 

Daily Fm constrained to be! 
Let thy grace, Lord, like a fetter, 

Bind my wandering heart to Thee." 

These hymns w^hich express the experiences of 
great and devout souls v^ill have to go. Bunyan's 
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners — one of 
the most optimistic books in the language — will 
have to be left undusted on the neglected back 
shelves of our libraries. I trust, however, that as 
we must see, if we will open our eyes, grace and law 
working together in our human life, and in all hu- 
man history, it will be possible for us to appreciate 
something of the glad and joyous feeling which Dr. 
Doddridge had when he wrote this jubilant 
hymn: 

"Grace! 'tis a charming sound! 

Harmonious to the ear! 
Heaven with the echo shall resound, 

And all the earth shall hear. 



LAW AND GRACE 259 

"Grace first contrived a way 

To save rebellious man; 
And all the steps that grace display, 

Which drew the wondrous plan. 

''Grace led my roving feet 

To tread the heavenly road; 
And new supplies each hour I meet 

While pressing on to God. 

"Grace all the work shall crown 

Through everlasting days; 
It lays in heaven the topmost stone 

And well deserves the praise." 

"Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye 
are not under law, but under grace.'' Not un- 
der Sinai, but under Calvary! Calvary means 
grace — the grace of God bringing salvation. 
There is nothing disgraceful but sin. There is no 
deliverance from the paralysis of sin but God's grace 
working like the atmosphere, silently but uni- 
versally, oxygenating our very souls, bringing 
health, i. e,, holiness. Do you wonder that men ex- 
periencing this should say : 

"Thou art heaven on earth to me, 
Lovely, mournful Calvary.*' 

Do you wonder that men experiencing this should 
exclaim: "He hath not dealt with us after our 
sins, nor rewarded us after our iniquities"? Do 
you wonder that, experiencing this, the Church in 
all ages should have taken as its benediction : *'The 
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God. 
and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you 
all. Amen"? 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 



The men of Nineveh shall stand up in the judgment 
with this generation, and shall condemn it: for 
they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and 
behold, a greater than Jonah is here. — Matt. 
12: 41. 



XIX 

THE FINAL JUDGMENT 

The idea of a judgment to be pronounced author- 
itatively on man and his life in the world that now 
is, meets us again and again in the New Testament. 
Specially do we find it on the lips of our Lord and 
in the synoptic gospels, though in St. John the idea 
is taken up and developed as necessarily present be- 
cause Christ is present. Our Lord must have re- 
garded it as a part of the gospel he had to offer to 
men. 

And, indeed, the idea of judgment has two as- 
pects, one of approval and one of condemnation. 
While the idea sometimes repels us, as we think of 
our own sinfulness and wish it could be hidden away 
forever, yet at other times it attracts us. When 
we think of God's judgment on our own personal 
lives, the feeling of comfort is not uppermost with 
us. But when the idea of judgment is more gen- 
eral, of men and movements outside ourselves, then 
it does undoubtedly bring relief and comfort. 

There cannot be a doubt that society is full of 
injustice. Men take advantage of one another. 
The strong oppress the weak. There are many suc- 
cessful forms of cooperative iniquity. Nations 



264 GLAD TIDINGS 

have again and again been wholesale robbers and 
murderers. Might has again and again in all gen- 
erations trampled on right. And not only on this 
broad area of collective interests, but on all narrower 
areas the working out of successful injustices can- 
not be denied. In civil life, in political life, in fam- 
ily life, in the life of individual relationships, again 
and again injustice has been successful and has tri- 
umphed. So much so that one fears that thousands 
of men and women have lived lives of bitterness and 
have died in doubt whether, if a Holy God lived, he 
would allow them to suffer such unavenged moral 
outrage. However optimistic we may be it is quite 
beyond our ability, or the ability of any man, to vin- 
dicate all the allowances of Divine Providence, or 
to affirm that they always harmonize in their work- 
ing with that sense of justice which God has im- 
planted in every one of us. 

For, though no man is an unprejudiced judge of 
himself and his own actions, yet in every one of us 
there is implanted a sense of justice which, when 
others are before its bar, is capable of giving a ver- 
dict not so very wide of the mark. 

In the light of the New Testament teaching, the 
final judgment is not man's on man. Except in a 
rough and general way men are not capable of pass- 
ing final judgments. Even in the administration of 
the law of the land we have higher courts to re- 
vise the findings of lower courts. One would sup- 
pose that men trained as lawyers are trained along 
this very line of judging of evidence, providing they 
could get all the evidence needful before them, 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 265 

would seldom arrive at an unjust judgment. And 
yet experts in judging are not trusted absolutely. 
Much less is a man trusted to give a verdict on his 
own case. Our judgment of ourselves can never 
be final. And certainly our judgment of others can 
never be final Clearly finality in judgment is not 
within human competency. 

And yet, implanted within us, there is an inerad- 
icable conviction that there is in all cases, between 
individuals and between nations, a right and a 
wrong. And back of that, there is the feeling — a 
feeling which persists in spite of every cold wind 
which blows upon it — that somehow, somewhere, 
sometime, the right will be shown, will be vindi- 
cated, and the wrong exposed and punished. 

It is manifest, then, that the truths of the New 
Testament are only authoritative recognitions of 
ideas and feelings already sown in the nature of 
man. 

But, as all our ideas and feelings are elementary, 
crude, and coarse and need civilizing and more 
Christianizing, if they are to represent the truth, 
is it not well for us to think over the suggestions 
which have come to us from him who seldom ar- 
gued, but almost invariably positively affirmed that 
which he taught. His mind was free from doubt. 
He moved in the midst of certainties. He was posi- 
tive and affirmative without being dogmatic. *'We 
speak that we do know, and bear witness of that we 
have seen." Knowledge and perception. In that 
region he moved. It is not ours. It is his own. 
No one but himself occupied that position. But he 



266 GLAD TIDINGS 

occupied it for our sakes that we might learn of him. 

The abihty to learn is the finest abiUty man has. 
People who are not capable of continuous learning 
are stupid. Of course they are to an extent stoni- 
fied — rockified — fossilized. The reading man is 
generally a reasonable man, because he is always 
putting himself under influences better and stronger 
than those which operate on other men. His self- 
assertiveness is generally mild and modest. I really 
don't know what judgment will finally have to be 
passed upon a man who cannot learn, even from 
the Christ of God. And yet our Lord has invited 
us to this beautiful form of fellowship, this union 
with himself of pupil and Teacher, of scholar and 
Master: 'Xearn of me!'' 

There are some subjects on which we can know 
nothing definite and positive unless we learn of him, 
and this of the final judgment is one. He has em- 
phasized it in many illustrations, as in this chapter 
and that magnificent and most dramatic setting- 
forth of the same ideas in the twenty-fifth chapter 
of this same gospel. It is not necessary to take the 
records literally in order to get the substance out 
of them. Nor is it necessary to set the more ex- 
ternalized ideas of judgment in opposition to the 
representations of St. John, who makes the Saviour 
say: ''For judgment I am come into this world,'* 
suggesting that there is an actual revealing and 
separation of men here and now — that Christ, as 
a present light in the world, discerns between the 
souls of men, attracting and gladdening those who 
are of the truth and repelling those who do evil in- 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 267 

evitably, "multiplying for them the pains of dark- 
ness, hatred, and sin." 

Everything external is also internal. A man be- 
clouded in mind, moves in a darkened external 
world. Of course there is a judgment going on all 
the while — - present and real, though not always dis- 
cernible in the souls of men. All deeds, good and 
bad, leave within a spiritual result. We must not 
forget that, if we would know what the final judg- 
ment will be. According to our Lord's teaching it 
will not be in plunging a man into deeper darkness, 
but in lifting him into fuller light, so that he sees 
himself as he is and others see him as he is. This 
is quite in accord with those words of the great 
Master himself: *'This is the judgment, that the 
light is come into the world, and men loved the 
darkness rather than the light; for their works 
were evil.'' You know how beetles and other crea- 
tures who hide away under stones are panic-stricken 
and scurry away in all directions trying to hide 
themselves when once the stone is removed and the 
light is let in upon them. We must never forget 
that the judgment of the latter day is the judgment 
of light and love. Hence it is, that the truth of a 
final judgment is part of the gospel. It is an ele- 
ment in it. 

When we gather up all these teachings of our 
Lord on judgment, some of them will surprise us, 
it may be. The judgments belonging to earth, even 
of nations and cities, like Sodom and Gomorrah, are 
provisional, not final. Startling, is it not, to hear 
our Lord say, speaking of Capernaum and of Sodom 



268 GLAD TIDINGS 

and Gomorrah : "It shall be more tolerable for the 
land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judg- 
ment, than for that city"? ''The men of Nineveh 
shall stand up in the judgment with this generation, 
and shall condemn it: for they repented at the 
preaching of Jonah; and behold, a greater than 
Jonah is here." 

If we are going to be perfectly honest with our 
Lord's teaching, we have to follow it wherever it 
leads. Of course, sometimes we shall make mis- 
interpretations. The taking passages out of their 
context is always a ticklish kind of business. It is 
easy to make anyone say the opposite of what he 
has said by quoting the exact words of one-half 
only of his utterance. That has often been a trick of 
controversialists. But its dishonesty and meanness 
are transparent. If in interpreting Holy Writ we 
cannot always reconcile one part with another, what 
then ? Does it not show us that we have not grasped 
the subject in all its bearings? 

Take this subject of a final divine judgment on 
each human life, and on life in its relations. It is 
dominated by two ideas — that of manifestation and 
that of separation. If we are to get any light on 
the theme, these two ideas must be steadily kept be- 
fore the mind. 

And again: sometimes this judgment day seems 
spoken of as present and as now progressing. 
At other times it seems all in the future. Sometimes 
it seems to be of individuals and sometimes of na- 
tions. Sometimes judgment is spoken of as the sep- 
aration of the wheat from the chafif. Again, it is 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 269 

Spoken of as the separation of the wheat from the 
tares. And yet in a third aspect of it it is repre- 
sented as the separation of the sheep from the goats. 
Each of these three judgments seems to refer to 
three classes of judgments. If we desired to master 
the thought in each it would demand separate con- 
sideration of each and then a fourth study of the 
three as parts of a great whole, a trinity in unity. 

One despairs of doing anything but elementary 
work in the pulpit of to-day. Our time and oppor- 
tunity are so limited by the restless social conditions 
of life that to get a congregation who will patiently 
think down to the roots of things in deliberate con- 
secutive thought — one might as well expect an ir- 
ruption of emigrants from the planet Mars. What 
times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord 
they must have had when the hour-glass stood on 
the side of the pulpit and as the people saw the sands 
running out they cried (as in the case of Tillotson, 
I think it was), ''Turn the glass! Turn the glass!'' 
and thought themselves defrauded if they had any- 
thing less than an hour and a half. It is nonsense 
to say that those people were not intelligent. Read 
the discourses of Jeremy Taylor and Barrow and 
Andrews and Tillotson and others hardly less 
erudite than these. In them is a combination of 
spirituality and intellectuality penetrating and in- 
forming to a degree. 

We have not sufificiently recognized that our 
modern civilization is making upon us unreasonable 
demands. It is calling attention ever to the house 
and its furniture and not to the tenant that lives in 



270 GLAD TIDINGS 

it. That cannot be a high order of civihzation 
which pays more attention to what a man has than 
to what he is. The quahty of our civihzation is 
suggested by the answer to such a question as this : 
What did that man die worth? If it is answered 
in dollars and cents, the civilization may be a gilded 
and bejewelled civilization, but it is low. If the 
question is answered in human terms, in terms of 
intellect, emotion, affection, moral appreciation, then 
the civilization is high. In our country and in some 
other countries, there is a present judgment. There 
is a real sense in which the words are true: "Now 
is the judgment of this world.'' Our civilization 
must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. It 
is true that judgment is not altogether in the future. 

There is no future except that which grows out 
of the present. Hence nothing can be altogether in 
the future. The reaping is in the future, but the 
sowing is now. If ever we forget that one of the 
laws of the Eternal Righteousness is that ''what- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,'' if 
ever we forget that, our ideas and feelings as to 
judgments will necessarily be all astray. 

If we would read our New Testament intelli- 
gently, we must recognize the principle that runs 
through human nature and human life, that nothing 
is future which is not present. The laws of a coun- 
try exist all the time, are in force all the time, every 
day, every hour. But only when the judge brings 
them to bear upon some specific case are they mani- 
fested. Laws become judgments when they are 
personally appHed. Silently the law is judging us 




THE FINAL JUDGMENT 271 

every hour we live. But there are periods of mani- 
festation w^hen it separates between its friends and 
foes. And this is in the nature of things. No right- 
eous laws are arbitrary. That is why no man can 
escape. The judgment is going on within him. A 
man's character is slowly, imperceptibly, but not the 
less really, changing by everything he does. It is 
that character which is finally to be manifested. 
There is no possibility of the final judgment being 
wrong, since it is the man manifesting himself. For 
that is St. Paul's word: ''We must all be made 
manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ.'' 

Do we not see that this makes wickedness the 
supreme of folly? A man doing a wrong thing al- 
ways secretly thinks he can get off. If he is a man 
with lots of good in him, he thinks that by and by 
he can repent. If he is a reckless, dare-devil sort 
of man, he thinks he will get ofif as easily as others 
anyway, and perhaps there is no God and no judg- 
ment — and he don't care if there is, he will take his 
chances. Everybody does as he does, only they 
keep it quiet. Besides, as things are nowadays, a 
man cannot get ahead except by lying a little and 
defrauding a little. Thus the man lives his life in 
an atmosphere of lies, and though he is sometimes 
not easy and comfortable about it, he thinks that 
somehow or other he can get good out of evil and 
not be irreparably damaged. As the author of the 
book of Ecclesiastes puts it: "Because sentence 
against an evil work is not executed speedily, there- 
fore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them 
to do evil" The thought that judgment is only in 



272 GLAD TIDINGS 

the future and that it is not present — how many 
men have been misled by this assumption! But if 
character is changing from higher to lower or from 
lower to higher, daily, hourly, if all the time we 
are growing souls, as during a certain number of 
years children grow bodies, then no day is without 
its judgment-mark. And if we make the mark our- 
selves, if it is our own signature, how can we es- 
cape? And how can there be any error? In the 
New Testament conception of it judgment is self- 
manifestation in order to separation. 

Incidentally we may remark that though the 
speaker of the Sermon on the Mount has warned us 
against the censorious spirit in the words : ''J^dge not 
that ye be not judged,'' yet it is quite impossible for 
us not to form judgments of men and women, favor- 
able or unfavorable. They may be prejudiced and 
therefore unjust. They may be just judgments 
and we may be really sorry to have to form them, 
and we may feel it our duty to keep them to our- 
selves. We may refuse to take the initiative of do- 
ing injury to any man. That may be a rule of life 
with us, as Christian disciples. But it is amazing 
how often this general public, or some part of it, 
knows more about us than we think it does, espe- 
cially if we are engaged in any form of trade, and 
how correct it is in its judgments. Correct, but 
often, generally indeed, I think (of course there are 
exceptions) charitable. 

A good man hates to think badly of another man. 
He has no pleasure in it. And that is one of the 
certain signs of goodness. But there is one sign 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 273 

of judgment as present which no crooked man, no 
man who is doing his utmost to walk safely along 
a rotten plank, no man who is a dodger or a sharper 
escapes. Such a man never has the respect of his 
fellow men, the respect of men whose respect is an 
echo of the voice of God. There are lots of incon- 
sistencies a man may have and still retain the re- 
spect of honorable men. But there are some things 
which are not as harmless as inconsistencies, they 
are of the nature of planned and deliberate lying 
and fraud. Once let a young man be suspected of 
that and one form of the judgment of God is here 
and now — the loss of the respect of honorable 
men. 

It seems to me we sometimes forget the teaching 
of our Lord in that parable of his in which he tells 
us as plainly as parabolic imagery will allow, that 
we are being tested as to our moral worth and as 
to our future place and serviceableness in the final 
kingdom of God, by our use of what he calls the 
''unrighteous mammon." *'If therefore ye have not 
been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will 
commit to your trust the true riches? And if ye 
have not been faithful [as a steward] in that which 
is another's, who will give you that which is your 
own?" Material things, like the rains of heaven 
and the sunshine (out of which they all come), 
seem to be given alike to evil and good. By their 
use (so suggests our Lord) we are being tested. 
Our part and lot in the true riches will be deter- 
mined by our use of this so-called ''unrighteous 
mammon." It is a truth severely practical and of 



274 



GLAD TIDINGS 



course incredible to any one but a Christian disciple. 
But that our Lord taught it, seems to me beyond 
question. 

In every hour of life, then, God's judgment is 
working, as silently and really as the law of gravi- 
tation. Here, now, every good deed leaves a de- 
posit in character. It makes a man nobler. Every 
bad deed leaves a deposit in character. It makes 
a man meaner. Even physiognomy reveals the 
working of these inward changes. The miser, the 
sensualist, the revengeful man are constantly be- 
traying the jfire and passion within. Voice-tones 
are irrepressible tell-tales. Wrapped around as we 
are with the thick covering of this silently and imper- 
ceptibly changing body, there is still some degree 
of self-manifestation. But when the mortal is 
sloughed off and we are clothed upon with our house 
from heaven, which is refined to the immediate ne- 
cessities of the spirit, disguise will be impossible. 
The thought, the feeling will immediately flash into 
evidence and become the very language of our life. 
The only beauty then will be truth and sincerity and 
sympathy of character. ''We must all be mani- 
fested before the judgment-seat of Christ." 

I must not close these crude suggestions without 
reminding you that these ideas stand the test of the 
law that nothing is true which is not represented 
in the unperverted instincts of human nature. In 
every one of us there is (as I said) a sense of right 
and wrong, not equally developed in all men, of 
course. In every one of us there is conscience, ap- 
proving and condemning. Wt may drug it, silence 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 275 

it, try to persuade ourselves that it is only super- 
stitious fear. Entirely kill it we cannot. No 
wicked man has rest or peace. He is full of fears 
and apprehensions. All this judgment-teaching has 
its representative within the man. It harmonizes 
with the inner workings of the conscience of man. 
Not a man living, unless he is embruted through 
and through, can believe that Nero and St. Paul, 
when they leave this world, stand on the same level 
before the judgment-seat of Christ. 

If we are not careful students of the New Testa- 
ment there is something there we may miss. I 
cannot stay to quote proof-tests, but the New Testa- 
ment seems to teach that wherever gospel truth has 
been freely proclaimed, man is not condemned for 
being a sinner, but because he has rejected the Sav- 
iour who was able and willing to deliver him from 
sin. The question has often been asked : Does civ- 
ilization civilize? In a so-called (often mis-called) 
Christian civilization are men surrounded by all 
that civilization can give — all material things, all 
results of cultured mind, splendid literature, every- 
thing possible for the body, all arts and sciences, 
even the high moralities Christianity has made possi- 
ble — yet deliberately ignoring all that Jesus the 
Christ specially stands for. The men so' situated must 
be judged by a higher standard than Sodom and Go- 
morrah. That they should not would be a mani- 
fest injustice. The men who have had all the 
blessings of an advanced civilization and have used 
them so as to steep themselves in a completer materi- 
aHsm, must they not be judged by what they have 



276 



GLAD TIDINGS 



rejected? That judgment is discriminating, as is 
shown by our Lord's own illustrations. 

Before the judgment-seat of Christ no honest 
man need fear. The gospel in this theme is in this 
fact — that it is the judgment-seat of Christ. When 
love is on the judgment-seat no wrong can be done. 
But let us never forget that love includes justice, 
or righteousness, if you like the word better. No 
one knows himself, as to what he really is, till he 
stands by the Christ. The difficulty of getting the 
truth into a human mind is owing to the fact that 
we don't know ourselves. If I were to go to some- 
one whom I had found always seeing the worst in 
everybody and blind to the best and suggest that 
such a propensity is an indication of wrongness of 
temper or spirit, the charge would probably be met 
with swuft denial. Herein is one of the greatest dif- 
ficulties of the Christian minister. The truth he 
preaches is not appropriated by those who most need 
it. When a man sees himself as he is, the end of 
all discipline has been reached. Never will a man 
see himself as he is until his thoughts and Christ's 
are accordant. In the nature of things there can 
be no final judgment on individuals or nations on 
earth. Until an apple is ripe the judgment on its 
quality is premature. All judgments made here are 
preliminary. 

But from these facts we cannot escape: Society 
is full of unrighted wrongs and always has been. 
The blood of Abel crieth unto God from the ground 
in every generation of men. Society is crowded 
with men who are continually repudiating all re- 



THE FINAL JUDGMENT 277 

sponsibility for murdered Abels. ''Am I my broth- 
er's keeper?" is a question repeated in substance 
by countless numbers day by day. Without a final 
judgment, we cannot believe in divine justice. God 
reveals himself as "a just God and a Saviour.'' 
There is no element in the gospel more grateful to 
us (except when we are ourselves in the wrong) 
than this : That the affairs of this human race shall 
never be wound up till all wrong (especially seem- 
ingly successful wrong) shall be punished and all 
right shall be vindicated. Through Old Testament 
and New, one note sounds clear and full. Abraham 
pleading for Lot in Sodom struck it first, and it has 
vibrated through the ages, caught up and thrown 
forward by prophets and apostles and the great 
Master himself, ''That be far from thee to do after 
this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, 
that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that 
be far from thee : shall not the Judge of all the earth 
do right?" 

And so we must feel that the judgment-note is 
a note without which the gospel would lack its full- 
toned harmony. Not till all wrong is righted and 
all injUvStice punished, can the great chorus of the 
redeemed be sung: "Hallelujah: for the Lord oiu* 
God, the Almighty reigneth." 



i 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 



Rejoice in the Lord alway: again I will say, Re- 
joice, — PhiL 4: 4, 



M 



XX 

REJOICE IN THE LORD 

This is a high-sounding note which, in our day, 
we so seldom seem to reach. I am not sure but we 
should be right if we said that joy was the highest 
attainable Christian grace, the final achievement of 
godliness. It has a bright eye, a sweet smile, a ra- 
diant countenance. It resembles perfect physical 
health. A man in robust health, unconscious of 
head, or heart, or lungs, or liver, or any other or- 
gan, has quiet and clear vision, something of color 
in his cheek, supple limbs, firm step. There is a 
freeness and springiness about him which is con- 
tagious. Health implies the effective and normal 
working of all the physical and mental faculties and 
powers. And so joy may be regarded not so much 
as a thing in itself, as the result and sign of the ex- 
istence, cooperation, of other things. It implies the 
possession of firm faith, buoyant hope, and ardent 
love in the spirit of the man who has it. 

Of course it may be simulated, as an oil painting 
may be by an oleograph, or as real flowers by wax 
or paper flowers. But I am speaking of the real 
thing, that which you find in Paul, or in Samuel 



282 GLAD TIDINGS 

Rutherford's letters, or occasionally in individuals 
of our own time whose rest in God has seemed to 
be like that of a flower simply delighting in the em- 
brace of the sunshine. I have known a few people 
of this kind and they have always been a wonder 
and a delight to me. 

I knew a minister who, on the very Sabbath after 
the death and burial of his best beloved daughter, 
went into his pulpit and preached from this very 
text. It was the only thing he could do. He could 
not rejoice in the loss of his daughter who had been 
the light of his eyes. He could not rejoice in his 
desolated home. He could not rejoice in his own 
tottering helplessness. But he could rejoice in one 
who had conquered death and had opened to his be- 
loved child the gate of everlasting life. He could 
rejoice in the revelations Christ had made of the 
immediate transition to Paradise. And what better 
medicine could a bleeding heart have! 

"When all created streams are dried 

Thy fulness is the same; 
With this will I be satisfied, 

And glory in thy name.'* 

Now I know perfectly well that to try to stimu- 
late people to joyfulness is waste of effort. Neither 
happiness nor joy can be had for the direct seeking. 
They are both fruit on the tree. Before you can 
get the fruit, you must have the tree and the ground 
in which to plant it and the sun and the rain and 
the congenial atmosphere. There is not, nor can 
there be, joy in the soul of that kind of man called 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 283 

in our New Testament "the natural man/' by which 
the apostle means a man who is simply adjusted 
to the present order of things as a tree is or as a 
four-footed animal is, but adapted to no higher or- 
der. John Newton, Cowper's great friend, sang 
years ago: 

"Joy is a fruit that will not grow 

In Nature's barren soil. 
All we can boast, till Christ we know, 

Is vanity and toil. 

''But where the Lord has planted grace 

And made his glories known, 
There fruits of heavenly joy and peace 

Are found, and there alone." 

If, however, it is of no service to stimulate a mere 
"man of the world'' to joyfulness, because he does 
not possess in his garden the tree on which it grows, 
yet there are others who ought to know experi- 
mentally what joy is. It is one of the gifts which 
in his last will and testament our Lord bequeathed 
to his disciples. ^'That my joy might remain in you 
and that your joy might be made full." Ripe fruits 
— Baldwin apples for instance — have fine color 
and exquisite fragrance. Joy is a sign of ripening 
piety. Yet to some temperaments it seems almost 
impossible. The utmost to which they can attain is 
peace.' Joy is beyond them. Those of us who were 
born with a dark streak of melancholy in us, and a 
tendency to pessimism, who all our lives have had to 
fight these tendencies, are thankful if only we can 
get some taste of that peace of God which passeth 
the ability of the intellect to account for. Joy is 



aa4 



GLAD TIDINGS 



one note too high for our competency. And yet, 
we cannot close our eyes to the revelation that it is 
the gift of Christ to his disciples. They are entitled 
to it. They have a right to it. It is the character- 
istic note of a mind cured of its doubtings and 
cleansed from its impurities. ^^Rejoice and be 
glad," is the dominant note in Christianity. "Be- 
hold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which 
shall be to all the people: for there is born to you 
this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is 
Christ the Lord.'' 

There are several types of piety which may be 
genuine as far as they go; but they always remind 
one of unripe fruit. The sweetest apple has stages 
in its development when it is unpalatable. Each of 
us is born with his own temperament. Psychol- 
ogists tell us there are four temperaments — the 
sanguine temperament, the choleric temperament, the 
phlegmatic temperament^ and the melancholy tem- 
perament. And while in most people there is a mix- 
ture of the four, yet in each of us one or other is 
dominant. The Spirit of God working within us, 
in that unconscious part of our mind of which we 
know comparatively little, has to penetrate, subdue, 
and illuminate one or other of these temperaments 
in us. 

A man comes to the point where he yields, willing 
to be divinely guided. The old theology says he 
is "converted'' to God. The real element in it is 
this submission of the will, this giving up the fight 
with his conscience, this act of obedience which car- 
ries the life into a new relationship. It is the obe- 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 285 

dience to Christ which is the saving element in it — 
an obedience possible to a child as to an adult — and 
it brings satisfaction with it — a sense of rest, a 
sense of having done something right and good. 
And often something more. Many a man has con- 
quered the indecision of his life and has realized, 
in giving in, bm inward sensation which has been 
delightful to him. The old words have fitted him : 

'' 'Tis done, the great transaction's done! 

I am my Lord's, and he is mine. 
He led me, and I followed on, 

Pleased to obey the voice divine." 

The man says : ''Now I am a Christian," and for 
a time he gets a satisfaction out of the feeling which 
is as real as the satisfaction a man has when he 
has secured for his own the woman he has always 
admired. But, by and by, the man finds the old tem- 
perament still in him. He gives way to anger just 
as easily, though not so willingly. He falls into 
melancholy and the cloud over him hides the sun. 
He asks himself whether he ought to have taken 
that resolve. 

My dear sir, be thankful for the battle within. 
Be thankful for the doubt and the fear. The hope- 
less men and women are those who never have any 
such battle, who are so conformed to society as it 
is and to conditions as they are, as to be stagnant, 
like a malaria-breeding pool to which there is no 
visible inlet and no outlet. No man ever yet fought 
steadily and perseveringly, under the banner of 
Christ, with the lowest propensities in his own na- 
ture, who did not win. That is a strong statement 



286 



GLAD TIDINGS 



and you have to take it for what it is worth. I can't 
stay to defend it. 

It behooves us to recognize that Hfe is a process. 
But it is a process of growth, as the ripening of an 
apple is a process of growth. In its earher stages 
Christian Hfe may seem acid, even sour, if it gets 
associated with a choleric or melanchoHc tempera- 
ment ; but it is not the Christian life that is acid and 
sour, it is the old temperament. Have patience! 
Wait! Give the new obedience time to get itself 
established, to develop and ripen. Never is Chris- 
tian piety narrow and acid, never complaining and 
fault-finding, never gloomy and morose. It is not 
its nature. It is the old temperament with which 
a man was born, still fitful and unsubdued. It is 
the apple half ripe. But if it remains in the sun 
and in the air, and still joined to the ^ tree, it will 
gradually ripen, and by and by the golden tints will 
be there and the exquisite fragrance. It is not what 
a life is just now, at this particular stage in it, which 
determines its value, but what, according to the laws 
by which all life is pervaded, is ahead. Ahead in a 
Christian life there is peace and rest and gladness 
and joy. There is all that we are hankering after 
here on earth and trying to buy for money and we 
cannot get it. The more joy we get into our life, 
real, genuine joy, the better. But we can get it only 
by becoming more Christ-like, not less so. 

The music of the Church is, when adequately ap- 
prehended, the joy language of the Church. A man 
without the sense of the divine overmastering him, 
can never produce great music, i, e., music with spir- 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 287 

itual suggestiveness in it, worthy to be employed in 
the services of the Church. A great deal of what 
is called modern music has neither soul nor heart 
in it, any more than the first six books of Euclid 
have any soul or heart in them. It is musical mathe- 
matics and mechanics and nothing else. If you sup- 
pose that they who have written music worthy of 
men who have a divine spark in them, were irre- 
ligious, may I remind you of a few autobiographic 
facts. 

Let us take first Bach's religious music, ''which 
voices the tender piety of old Protestant Germany." 
What does he say of himself and his art? I will 
quote his very words: ''The sole end and aim," he 
>writes, "of general base, like that of all music, should 
be nothing else than God's glory and pleasant ex- 
altation of feeling. When this object is not kept 
in view, there can be no true music ; but an infernal 
scraping and bawling." 

Handel's music appealed more to the popular 
mind. He was inspired by a primitive emotional 
religious sentiment that enabled him to become the 
"popular preacher" of music. It is recorded of him 
that he might often be seen at St. George's, Hanover 
Square, London, expressing, by his looks and man- 
ner, the utmost fervoi of devotion. He wished he 
might die on Good-Friday "in hopes," as he said, 
"of meeting his good God, his sweet Lord and Sav- 
iour, on the day of his resurrection." Only that 
kind of man could have written the devout and soul- 
subduing strains of the Messiah. 

What of Haydn and the Creation? During its 



288 



GLAD TIDINGS 



composition, he says: ''I was never so devout as 
then; daily I prayed for strength to express myself 
in accordance with the divine will." 

What of Mozart? In a letter to his father, he 
writes : ^'Have no concern for me : I have God ever 
before my eyes; I acknowledge his omnipotence; I 
fear his anger; but I also acknowledge his love, his 
mercy and pity toward his creatures; he will never 
forsake his servants/' 

Of Beethoven it is written : '^He lived and worked 
in God's sight," and spoke of writing his music, 
"for the honor of the Almighty, the Eternal, the 
Infinite." Now you know the secret of the fascina- 
tion and charm which these men have over all minds 
that are not unimpressible and incurably frivolous. 

I venture to say that if you were to take any 
Church hymn-book and mark off the tunes which 
insinuated themselves into your spirit and excited 
in you feelings of rest and peace and joy, you would 
find, on inquiring for their authors, that they were 
men, like Dykes, of fervent piety, men who in this 
way prayed and "made melodies in their hearts to 
the Lord." Whatever of ours is not service to God 
naturally becomes inferior. It is when the deepest 
and divinest part of our nature is stirred that we 
do our best work. The greatest artists and the 
greatest musicians all could say: "My work is 
worship." When the joy element enters into our 
work, then it is that all our faculties awake from 
slumber and begin to sing. 

This is one great reason why there is so much 
slovenly service of God. We have not got to the 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 289 

level of rejoicing in the Lord. Our Christ is not 
real to us. He is only a shadow-Christ. He is not 
the greatest and richest property we have. We 
don't look on him as *'an inheritance incorruptible, 
undefiled, and that fadeth not away." We have 
other things far more valuable. If we had really 
received into our minds and hearts all that he has 
said about putting away our sins and making them 
as though they had never been, we could not help 
rejoicing in him. If we believed — really and 
heartily believed — his words '^I go to prepare a 
place for you ... I come again, and will receive you 
unto myself," we could not help rejoicing in him. 
If we believed — really believed, I mean — that he 
says to us when " the shadow feared of man" creeps 
over us, as he said to the dying man beside him on 
Calvary: ''To-day shalt thou be with me in Para- 
dise," we could not help rejoicing in him. It would 
be contrary to all we know oi human nature. The 
measure of our joy is the measure of our faith. A 
man in poor health has no resonance in his voice. 
He has no firmness in his step. And so a man with 
a faith in Christ which is like a flickering candle 
ready to go out, has no joy-tones in his voice and 
no firmness in his step. He is ready enough for 
an excuse why he should not go to the house of 
God, ''with a multitude keeping holy-day." Of 
course he can't sing, not even inwardly, much less 
vocally. 

Ah, but you are saying in your heart, even now : 
"It is all very well for you to talk about joy; but, 
if you knew all about me, and my troubles and dis- 



290 



GLAD TIDINGS 



appointments, joy would be the very last thing you 
would expect of me/' May I be allowed to remind 
you that the man who wrote these words: ''Rejoice 
in the Lord alway: again I will say, Rejoice," knew 
more of trouble and disappointment than any of us 
here have ever known or ever will know. Turn 
to that second letter to the Corinthians and read: 
'*0f the Jews five times received I forty stripes save 
one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I 
stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a 
day have I been in the deep; in journeyings often, 
in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from 
my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils 
in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in 
the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in labor and 
travail, in w^atchings often, in hunger and thirst, in 
fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Beside those 
things that are without, there is that which presseth 
upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches." This 
is the man who writes: ''Rejoice in the Lord aU 
ivay: again I will say, Rejoice/' 

Is there not a suggestion here we must not let 
slip, that any man who has learned how to rejoice 
in the Lord alway, can get through even a cata- 
logue of woes like Paul's and come out unscathed? 
''The joy of the Lord is your strength" — there it 
is; put in so many words. "Who for the joy that 
was set before him endured the cross" — there it 
is again. Faith is the trunk of the tree; hope the 
leaves of the tree; love the sap in the tree; joy is the 
fruit of the tree. 

There is no way then of attaining to joy except 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 291 

by cultivating faith, hope, and love. Deliberately 
I say ''cultivating'' : for faith, hope, and love, like 
wheat, oats, and potatoes, must be cultivated if they 
are to be anything more than unripe possibilities. 
No man who would develop into strength the spir- 
itual potentialities of his nature, can afford to live 
in an atmosphere of doubt, of hopelessness, of un- 
charitableness ; or to keep company with the faith- 
less, the hopeless, the loveless. Every man breathes 
the atmosphere of the society he favors. An at- 
mosphere deprived of its oxygen is not favorable to 
health, and godlessness is for the soul of man just 
such an atmosphere. If only we had more common- 
seiise it would save us from foolhardiness of life. 

I have one other thought and that the last. If 
joy is the highest Christian grace, the final reward 
of godliness (the idea with which we started) ; if 
it is the fruit on the tree of which faith is the trunk, 
hope the leaves, and love the sap; does it not sug- 
gest to us that our life hereafter will not be simply 
a reproduction of the life that now is, but another 
and higher kind of life — an ascent from this ? We 
sometimes hear the words ''the joy of living.'' 

'7oy was it then to live," 

is a line in one of our poets. But very few people 
ever experience the joy of mere living. Our joys, 
as Browning has it, are often "three parts pain." 
Every man and woman of us is striving after some- 
thing he never gets. Or if we get some of the 
things we strive after, they disappoint us; or when 
we get them we have lost the appetite for them — 



292 GLAD TIDINGS 

facts which prove to us that our hfe is a process, 
a journey, a going on to something else. There is 
something defective in every Hfe. But to the Chris- 
tian disciple we can say positively : ''There is joy 
ahead." There is a state where it is bliss simply 
to live, where prayer will be turned into praise, and 
''sorrow and sighing shall flee away." 

That is as much a part of the gospel message as 
is the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit 
of God. We may not be able to rejoice in ourselves, 
in our own attainments, in our own successes, in 
our own consistency, in our own strength. At 
times we feel like a bundle of infirmities and in- 
competencies and we are depressed and cast down 
because of it. There are so many things which we 
would change if we could. But we can't. And 
we think that in some other place, or in some other 
business, or in getting more of that objective thing 
of which already we have too much, we shall find 
what w^e seek. Never! Never! The want is too 
deep for that. It would be a diversion for a time, 
but the old want would return. In ourselves we 
cannot rejoice. But we can rejoice in the Lord, in 
his fatherhood, in his Saviourship, in his promises. 

If only we are on our way home it does not much 
matter that the beds at the inn are hard and the food 
not very well cooked and the people strangers. In 
a brief while we shall be in the love and light of 
home. Our life now, it may be, is like yonder fac- 
tory, where whistling bands and whirring wheels 
and darting shuttles and thousand threads, bewilder 
and confuse the stranger. But the maiden who sits 



REJOICE IN THE LORD 293 

by IS singing her joy-song untroubled, for she 
knows full well that every shooting shuttle and all 
these thousand threads are working out a beauti- 
ful pattern on the other side. And so it is in every 
good and true life. All things are working together 
for good to them that love God. Then, Rejoice! 
* 'Rejoice in the Lord alway: again I will say, 
Rejoice!" 



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